Man and Superman

About

Shaw's 1903 comedy applies Nietzsche's Superman and Schopenhauer's Life Force to a conventional romantic comedy: John Tanner, a radical intellectual who writes manifestos warning men against women's biological drive to capture them, finds himself irresistibly hunted by the charming Ann Whitefield. The play includes the famous Don Juan in Hell dream sequence — often performed separately — in which Shaw's philosophical ambitions run longest and most freely. Man and Superman was a commercial and critical triumph that consolidated Shaw's position as the most important playwright writing in English. It is simultaneously funnier and more philosophically serious than most of his work, and the central comic battle between Tanner and Ann remains delightful.