Man and Superman

'Man and Superman' is one of the finest and most devilish four-act dramas, written by George Bernard Shaw in 1903. Shaw was an Irish playwright, critic, polemicist and political activist. The series was written in response to calls for Shaw to write a play based on the Don Juan theme. It opened at the Royal Court Theatre in London on 23 May 1905, but it omitted the third act. It portrays Don Juan as the quarry instead of the huntsman. John Tanner, upon discovering that his beautiful ward plans to marry him, flees to the Sierra Nevada mountain range, where he is captured by a group of rebels. Tanner falls asleep, and dreams of the famous 'Don Juan in Hell' sequence, which features a sparkling Shavian debate among Don Juan, the Devil, and a talkative statue. With its fairy-tale ending and a cast literally from hell, it is a hilarious cocktail of farce, Nietzschean philosophy, and Mozart's Don Giovanni.