The Man of Destiny

About

Shaw's 1896 one-act imagines a youthful Napoleon in 1796, halted at an Italian inn by a strange young woman who has stolen his dispatches. The play is a comic encounter between two people of exceptional intelligence, each trying to outmaneuver the other, with Shaw using the historical setting to make observations about power, will, and the contradictions of greatness. Napoleon appears as a prototype of the Shavian realist-hero — clear-eyed, pragmatic, amoral — before the historical record has domesticated him. The play works excellently in informal settings and rewards two strong performers.