John Bull's Other Island

About

Shaw's 1904 play — written at Yeats's request for the Abbey Theatre, then deemed unperformable there — is his most directly political Irish work: an Irish-English business partnership returns to Ireland to develop a rural village, and the collision between Irish romanticism and English pragmatism generates Shaw's most sustained analysis of the national question. King Edward VII laughed so hard at a private performance that he broke his chair. The play's intelligence about the psychology of colonialism and anti-colonialism remains remarkably fresh, and the character of Father Keegan — a defrocked priest with visionary politics — is one of Shaw's most complex creations.