Major Barbara

About

Shaw's 1905 play confronts two irresistible forces: Major Barbara Undershaft, a Salvation Army officer of implacable idealism, and her father Andrew Undershaft, an arms manufacturer whose fortune is built on destruction and whose moral philosophy is correspondingly bracing. The play's central argument — that poverty is the real crime, and that Undershaft's honest manufacture of death is more honest than the charity that keeps the poor docile — remains one of Shaw's most challenging provocations. The debate between Barbara and her father is among the most exhilarating theatrical arguments in English, and the play ends in radical moral ambiguity.