Arms and the Man

About

Shaw's 1894 comedy — the first of his plays to reach London's West End — demolishes romantic myths about war and love simultaneously: Captain Bluntschli, a Swiss mercenary who carries chocolate instead of bullets and chooses practicality over heroism, arrives by accident in the bedroom of Raina Petkoff, a Bulgarian romantic who discovers he is more attractive than her officially heroic fiancé. The play uses the Balkan Wars setting to satirize both martial glory and sentimental romance, establishing the Shavian method of attacking cherished illusions through comic inversion. It made Shaw's reputation and introduced his paradoxical way of arguing — apparently joking while making a serious case.