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Plays Unpleasant

by George Bernard Shaw, Dan H. Laurence (Editor)

3.93 of 5 stars 3.93 · rating details · 151 ratings · 11 reviews

With the plays in this 1898 collection-Widower's Houses, The Philanderer, and Mrs. Warren's Profession-Shaw challenges his audiences' moral complacency in the face of serious social problems and inequities.

Author Bio: George Bernard Shaw (1856-1950) was one of the most prolific writers of the modern theater. He invented the modern comedy of ideas, expounding on social and

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Paperback, 288 pages

Published January 18th 1989 by Penguin Books (first published 1898)

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Jun 20, 2012 Smcleish rated it 4 of 5 stars

Originally published on my blog here in February 2000.

The three plays in this volume, Widowers' Houses, The Philanderer and Mrs Warren's Profession, are Shaw's earliest plays. Considered extremely daring at the time - it proved impossible to produce Mrs Warren's Profession for over twenty years - they can still in places shock us today. Each play is a blatant attack on Victorian society, on the hypocrisy of those who believe themselves morally blameless yet condemn the poor to live in degrading...more Originally published on my blog here in February 2000.

The three plays in this volume, Widowers' Houses, The Philanderer and Mrs Warren's Profession, are Shaw's earliest plays. Considered extremely daring at the time - it proved impossible to produce Mrs Warren's Profession for over twenty years - they can still in places shock us today. Each play is a blatant attack on Victorian society, on the hypocrisy of those who believe themselves morally blameless yet condemn the poor to live in degrading squalor and then live off the money this produces. This is clearest in Widowers' Houses (about slum landlords) and Mrs Warren's Profession (prostitution); The Philanderer is about attitudes to women, and has dated rather more.

The plot of Widowers' Houses is the simplest. Harry Trench falls in love with a girl he meets on holiday in Germany. Accepting her father's description of the source of his income as the respectable "property", they get engaged. Then Trench discovers that the property in question is one of London's most unpleasant slums and is horrified, and eventually he is astounded when it is revealed that his own wealth comes from the interest on a mortgage on the property. The idea is that even the most respectable are not far removed from the immoral and degrading, and this is also the central idea in Mrs Warren's Profession.

Though today most of the Victorian slums in Britain have long been cleared, prostitution is still a surprisingly important part of the economy. Shaw's message, though, is perhaps better applied in other areas. In the West, our relatively affluent lifestyles are to an extent dependant on the poverty of the Third World. People starve not just while our supermarkets are full, but to keep them full. Without the arms trade vital to the economy of many Western nations, much suffering would be eased. Pornography continues to degrade both those involved in making it and those addicted to it, while making fortunes.

Shaw manages to avoid the pitfall of preachiness which traps so many who write fiction to support a campaign, except perhaps in The Philanderer. The central location of this play is the fictional Ibsen Club, which stands for everything progressive in society. Today Ibsenism is an obsolete word, and it is clearer that Ibsen wrote about far more than Shaw thought, blinded as he was by his own social agenda. But at the turn of the century, plays like An Enemy of the People, Ghosts and (above all) A Doll's House seemed iconoclastic attacks on injustice in society. Ibsen was the subject of violent denunciation for the immorality seen in his plays (to the extent that he had to write an alternative happy ending to The Dollshouse before it could be performed in Germany), and this is what attracted Shaw the social campaigner. These plays are far simpler than Ibsen's, and much more obviously making a non-dramatic point. Their effect was much the same, and Shaw (unlike Ibsen) revelled in it.(less)

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Jul 22, 2011 David Sarkies rated it 4 of 5 stars

Shelves: modernist

Bernard Shaw excels himself once again. Okay, one might ask what is a Christian doing reading Bernard Shaw. Well, ever since I read Pygmalion I have simply loved his work, and in fact he is one of the best modern playwrights to have ever walked this earth. His plays are well structured, characters very realistic, and themes are very topical. The theme that seems to run through most of his plays is that of the rights of a woman. To understand this theme one does need to understand the context in...more Bernard Shaw excels himself once again. Okay, one might ask what is a Christian doing reading Bernard Shaw. Well, ever since I read Pygmalion I have simply loved his work, and in fact he is one of the best modern playwrights to have ever walked this earth. His plays are well structured, characters very realistic, and themes are very topical. The theme that seems to run through most of his plays is that of the rights of a woman. To understand this theme one does need to understand the context in which these plays were written.
My Dad had a quick read of one of the prologues to these plays and noticed his comment upon marriage, which immediately confirmed our suspicions that Shaw was not a Christian. However he is not antagonistic towards Christianity, and his Christian characters in the plays are not evil or manipulative. In fact many of them are very noble characters. However, it is to the theme of marriage which we will look because that is the key to understanding Shaw's attitude towards women.
Simply put, Shaw considers marriage to be little more than white slavery. Once again we need to understand the cultural context. His plays were written around the turn of the 20th Century in England, and if you were a women in that time you had no rights whatsoever. This is the key to the final play in this book 'Mrs Warren's Profession'. The prologue is an explanation as to the play, because the play itself is about prostitution. As he explains, unless a women were to get married she would either live her life as a pauper or a prostitute. If the woman had money she could not hold onto it, she had to get married, and when she did, the rights of all her property would instantly transfer to the husband.
It is the male characters in these plays who are unpleasant. The first play, The Widower's House, is about a landlord. Is he dodgy? It is questionable as he defends his actions by saying that if he were to properly maintain his houses then the poor who live in them would not be able to live in them. Therefore he believes that he is providing a community service, albeit a suspicious one. The male in the second play, The Philanderer, is much more unpleasant. The play opens with him sleeping with one woman, and rejecting the advances of a second, and closes with him losing both of them. He only becomes interested in the second woman when she decides she wants to marry another man. At the end of the play we have no sympathy for him, he brought it all upon himself. As he said, he will always be a philanderer (the English definition, not the Greek), and he does not say this with pride, but with regret.
While the theme of two of the Plays Unpleasant are with the treatment of women, the theme of the Widower's House is of the exploitation of the working class. Further, the man who, at the beginning of the play, ends an engagement over dirty money made from a slumlord, ends up selling his soul in a business dealing, and marrying anyway.
It is also noteworthy that despite Shaw's polemic against the institution of marriage, he did end up having a long and happy marriage. I guess it had to do with his desire not to behave like the society that he spent his life criticising.(less)

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Jun 17, 2012 Drew rated it 5 of 5 stars · review of another edition

Shelves: drama

George Bernard Shaw has done it again. I got to know GBS's works through performances at the Washington (DC) Stage Guild in the 1990s. What depth of insight. And never a dearth of words. I think he might be one of the world's greatest playwrights, equaling and at times surpassing, Shakespeare. It doesn't hurt that Shaw's take on society, politics and economics meld with many of my own, but I think that he gets to the heart of things quickly and in a way that the reader might not have expected. D...more

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Nov 26, 2008 Yamini Chandra rated it 4 of 5 stars

3 good plays from one of the most distinguished writers. I liked The Philanderer, Widowers' Houses and Mrs Warren's Profession- in that order.

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Feb 14, 2013 Ksenia rated it 3 of 5 stars · review of another edition

Shelves: grad-school

Mrs. Warren's Profession is the best one in this set of plays, and not just because of the controversy. Just a real good story!

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Aug 07, 2011 Sana rated it 5 of 5 stars · review of another edition

I liked it a lot. There were a lot of strong female characters, and the themes of the plays were surprisingly definitive.

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Feb 17, 2009 Stephanie added it

Shelves: 2009-plays

Definitely early plays. Glad I read it, because I'm interested in Shaw, but I didn't love any of the plays.

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May 05, 2010 Linda rated it 3 of 5 stars · review of another edition

I read the plays but Shaw's prefaces were unreadable.

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Jun 12, 2011 Cirque added it

For a class, pretty good but a bit plain

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Jun 30, 2012 Lizzie marked it as to-read-off-my-shelf · review of another edition

Shelves: used-book

Bought a copy at Housing Works yesterday.

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Mar 04, 2008 Ishita rated it 4 of 5 stars

Perceptive and ahead of its times.

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May 14, 2013 Maddison Wallace marked it as to-read

Shelves: own

May 13, 2013 Nick marked it as to-read · review of another edition

Apr 27, 2013 Michael added it · review of another edition

Apr 05, 2013 Halvor Hosar rated it 4 of 5 stars

Apr 03, 2013 Bryan added it · review of another edition

Apr 02, 2013 Rachel rated it 4 of 5 stars · review of another edition

Shelves: library

Mar 27, 2013 Werka Żelazo rated it 5 of 5 stars

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Mar 23, 2013 Racheal rated it 4 of 5 stars

Mar 19, 2013 Tania rated it 4 of 5 stars · review of another edition

Mar 17, 2013 Shawdiane rated it 5 of 5 stars

Mar 15, 2013 Mark rated it 4 of 5 stars

Mar 14, 2013 Kathryn rated it 3 of 5 stars

Shelves: university-books

Mar 13, 2013 Bart van Herk rated it 4 of 5 stars

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Shelves: plays

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About George Bernard Shaw

George Bernard Shaw was an Irish playwright, socialist, and a co-founder of the London School of Economics. Although his first profitable writing was music and literary criticism, in which capacity he wrote many highly articulate pieces of journalism, his main talent was for drama. Over the course of his life he wrote more than 60 plays. Nearly all his plays address prevailing social problems, but...more

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