I feel I should qualify this 4-star rating: it's based more on the results of reading the book than on my enjoyment of the book itself. Shaw is a hell of an intellect and a delightfully acerbic critic of society, and there are several trenchant observations and commentaries in Man and Superman. However, when he veers toward -- for example -- an argument for state-sponsored eugenics, it gets kind of appalling. If I were to rate the book solely on agreement with his propositions, it'd be a lower s...

Shaw has two distinct classes of follower: there are those who enjoy his vivid characters and humor, and those who idolize him as a revolutionary spiritual force. Each appreciates a different side of Shaw's character, and each of his plays presents a struggle between his creative instinct and his revolutionary ambitions.His need to play the iconoclast was not limited to his socialism, his vegetarianism, and his contempt for medicine. Shaw was never afraid to adopt unpopular ideas, especially whe...

In Act III Scene 2 of Man and Superman, Don Juan asks the Devil: "Oh, come! who began making long speeches? ..."Well, now you know the answer, folks. Shaw did.

Words cannot describe how horrible this play is. Acts 1, 2 and 4 constitute a banal Victorian love comedy in the style of Oscar Wilde which is seldom as funny as the genre requires. Act 3 which runs2 hours on its own is a bombastic reflexion on Heaven, Hell and Nietzsche's concept of life force. If all four acts are performed, the play runs to 6.5 hours which is well beyond the limits of any normal theatre-goer. The last time the Shaw Festival of Niagara-on-the-Lake performed the complete work,

Review first published on BookLikes: http://brokentune.booklikes.com/post/..."... the book about the bird and the bee is natural history. It's an awful lesson to mankind. You think that you are Ann's suitor; that you are the pursuer and she the pursued; that it is your part to woo, to persuade, to prevail, to overcome. Fool: it is you who are the pursued, the marked down quarry, the destined prey. You need not sit looking longingly at the bait through the wires of the trap: the door is open, and...

Shaw's first attempt to explore the concept of evolution23 June 2012We admit that when the divinity we worshipped made itself visible and comprehensible, we crucified it. This phrase above, which appears in the epilogue, pretty much sums up the theme of the entire play, and that is that it is impossible for man to evolve simply because we do not want to evolve, and everytime somebody comes along to show us how to evolve we either kill them, or completely corrupt their teachings so as to bring us...

4.75/5Likely the most based and Nietzschean novel ever written even if it does go in for a dose of socialism.

I am quite amazed at the tension between Ann and Jack Tanner, despite the fact that Jack announced so emphatically that he had the least intention to marry Ann. Still, whenever they met, Jack was interested in converse with Ann, who took advantage of the twists and turns in the conversation to snare her prey. Actually in real life, women do that every day. And the older women get, the more women have to engage in such activities. Well, probably not every woman. Some just completely give up on re...

Shaw has packed many high-level topics into this play, while at the same time keeping long portions of the dialogue fairly low-level. Two topics jump out most frequently: hell and enjoyment. His take on each respective topic is fresh, seemingly from an entirely new perspective.In the third act, the characters' conversation stands out in a couple ways. The explanation of hell from Don Juan, the Statue, and The Devil's point of view is unique. From a Judeo-Christian standpoint, it reeks of blasphe...

Look, there are three awesome acts in this and then there's that whole thing in the middle where Don Juan argues with the devil. Is the rest of the play just an excuse for Act III? Is it, like, the bread around a Don Juan / Satan sandwich? I preferred the bread.I didn't hate the Don Juan / Satan part. I underlined a whole bunch of stuff that was really smart and / or funny. I just...it obviously goes on too long. The characters acknowledge it themselves!Pygmalion was better.Soundtrack: - The Suf...

Reader: Oh, hi, book! How are you doing?Book: Contemplating the sense of life! [Three pages speech about the sense of life], you see?Reader: Erm... yes... anyway, have you been anywhere nice recently?Book: I have been to the Sierra Nevada, captured by bandits, held for ransom and then gone to hell.Reader: They killed you?!Book: Oh, no, I fell asleep.Reader: And you couldn't have done that at home?Book: What is the sense in sleeping if you don't do it in charming surroundings? And at least now I

It's Nobel Revisit Month (it is a very small one-woman festival, so don't worry if you have never heard of it!), and "Man And Superman" is on the schedule, because I need to laugh a bit.I must have been laughing when I took notes on the treatise/reflection/play or whatever else it is, because I can hardly read my handwriting. Well, some people would now claim that it is never possible to read it, and that I should finally give up my cursive, but usually I myself know what I mean.Luckily, Shaw ex...

I have a huge inferiority complex about myself. That prevents me to approach great books, lest I wouldn't understand the great writers. I had heard the name of Bernard Shaw and how great a writer he was, in my school days. But never dared to read him.Now, that some gray hairs have begun to reveal themselves in my head, I have been trying to imbibe some of the thoughts of great minds. Some times I fail, sometimes they fail me, but some other times, they get in to my mind and make me realize thing...

This play is really very learnedIt was written by this guy BernardAnd really I think the title is a bit of a lieBecause this Superman doesn’t wear a cape or flyOr catch bad guys like Lex Luther or BraniacIt seems to be all about an idea invented by that maniacWith a name nobody can spell, Friedrich NietzcheAbout whom GB Shaw is keen to teach yaAs for the rest, a smorgasbord of intellectual dumplingsEnlivened by the characters’ neverending grumblingsThere’s a hypocritical romanticWhose psychology...

If only this play were done as a comic book... it would still really, really, really suck (but then, you never know about the quality of the artwork).This book was so bad that I stopped reading it halfway through Act III, near about line 360. In fact, right after this passage, which I pick up toward the end of a one and one-half page-long ramble that some sad sack actor will be expected to recite from memory:THE DEVIL. I could give you a thousand instances; but they all come to the same thing: t...

Bernard Shaw meets Nietzsche for breakfast, Dante for lunch, Faust for dinner and shares a nightcap with MozartThis is a complex play, in so many ways, typical of GBS. His loquaciousness really knows no bounds and I commend any actor who has the temerity to take on the main male roles in this play. The speeches are long and interminable. Where one playwright might use one word, GBS doesn't just use ten, he'll go for the full century for good measure. And this is the major downfall to this play.

I had so much fun reading this! My first experience with modernist drama!Man and Superman struck me as picturesque, easy to imagine and follow. The humor is awesome too; couldn’t resist some laughs here and there. The most hilarious scene is when Tanner and Straker are captured by the lovesick brigand Mendoza; and after when, with an unusual build up of familiarity and affinity between prisoners and captor, Mendoza starts reading some poems he wrote for his Louisa, who turns out to be Straker’s

I think this is my first reading of George Bernard Shaw’s Man and Superman, an unwieldy play that I heard produced by Sir Peter Hall, featuring Dame Judi Dench and Ralph Fiennes. I had a huge Collected Plays of Shaw to keep me on track, as the production is more than four hours long, and Hall insisted on producing the whole thing, though that almost never happens. The play draws on Shaw’s reading of Nietzsche’s Superman concept AND Byron’s Don Juan (?!) and features one act with Juan in Hell. Th...

No, not that Superman, dumbass. The other one. You know, Nietzsche? The Übermensch? Blond beast? None of this rings a bell? What did you do at that fancy school of yours for four years? So anyway, Man and Superman is uber-bad. And now I don’t know what to make of Shaw. Heartbreak House was unexpectedly awesome: smart, funny, pessimistic—everything you could ask for in a play. But this one…blech. A lumbering and tendentious monster. It’s like a highbrow, 1905 version of All in the Family: no topi...

Shaw, our good, old satirist and intellectual iconoclast, offers his audiences a full peek into his philosophy and political ideology through his greatly amusing comedy of manners, 'Man and Superman' which was first staged in London's Royal Court Theatre in 1905. The play is popularly loved for its humorous sequences of secret marriages, confused love affairs and inheritance debates. However, when analysed on a philosophical level, the play is revealed to be so much more than just a light romant...