Arms and the Man: A Pleasant Play FROM THE PUBLISHER
"My whole secret is that I have got clean through the old categories of good & evil, and no longer use them even for dramatic effect."
The writer was George Bernard Shaw, and the occasion was the debut performance in 1894 of Arms and the Man. Shaw's explanation didnt't keep some critics from damning the play for its moral frivolousness. To their eyes, the genial revolutionary was making light of virtue, military valor, and romantic love, while making a hero of a Swiss soldier who prefers chocolate creams to bullets.
That, of course, is precisely what Shaw intended in this delightful comedy, which opposed a commonsensical coward to a narcissistic adventurer and not only awarded the pragmatic Captain Bluntschli the girl but a chain of hotels in the bargain. Romantic enough to have inspired an Oscar Strauss operetta, Arms and the Man continues to enchant with its wit and dazzling comedic reversals, while it crackles with the subversive notions of its iconoclastic author.
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