You Never Can Tell

About

Shaw's 1897 comedy is one of his most good-natured: two independent-minded young people arrive with a domineering mother at a seaside town where their estranged father — a wealthy dentist — has settled, and the romantic and family complications that follow are resolved with unusual warmth. The play was Shaw's attempt to write a conventional commercial comedy, and it succeeds rather well: it is funnier and less polemical than most of his work, and the character of Valentine — a charming poor dentist who discovers love undermines his practiced independence — is one of Shaw's most engaging comic creations.