Must-read plays by George Bernard Shaw

Almost every play serves as an artistic reaction, in real-time, to the issues of its day. The literary voices of the playwrights in their dialogues and monologues give you an insight into the political, cultural, and personal dramas throughout history. Moreover, watching a play is like buying a ticket to a live-action book. For people who like reading and watching plays, George Bernard Shaw is an exceptionally exciting and interesting playwright. Winner of the 1925 Nobel Prize in Literature, Shaw is considered to be the leading dramatist of his generation. Today, on his 165th birth anniversary, here are some plays by Shaw you must read.

An absolute masterpiece, the plot of this play revolves around a young man, John Tanner, who possesses advanced ideas and finds himself surrounded by a set of ordinary beings who are abject slaves to convention. The main idea of the play is to show how utterly futile modern ideas and advanced thoughts are when brought into practice amid the social conditions of our present civilized state.

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The play is about the 15th-century military figure Joan of Arc. She was a peasant girl who, believing that she was acting under divine guidance, led the French army in a momentous victory at Orléans in 1429 that repulsed an English attempt to conquer France during the Hundred Years' War.

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The play centers on an idealistic young woman, Barbara Undershaft, who is engaged in helping the poor as a Major in the Salvation Army in London. She is the daughter of Andrew Undershaft, a wealthy armaments manufacturer. When the Army accepts donations from Undershaft and a whiskey distiller, whose money Barbara regards as tainted, she resigns in disgust but eventually sees the truth of her father's reasoning that social iniquity derives from poverty.

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Written at a time when war raged across Europe, the play is a telling indictment of the generation responsible for the First World War. A combination of absurdity and tragedy, it is an uncanny depiction of a society on the threshold of an abrupt awakening.

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The play is a sharp lampoon of the rigid British class system of the day and a commentary on women's independence. The play centers on Professor of phonetics Henry Higgins who makes a bet that he can train an unkempt flower girl, Eliza Doolittle, to pass for a duchess at an ambassador's garden party by teaching her.

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The play takes place during the 1885 Serbo-Bulgarian War. It tells the story of a young Bulgarian woman, Raina, who encounters Bluntschli, a mercenary Swiss soldier for the Serbian army when he bursts into her bedroom and begs her to hide him. It's a mixture of wit and humor and presents a satire on the conventional values about war, love, social class, and morality.

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The play revolves around a community of doctors specializing, unbeknownst to them, in different types of expensive, fraudulent treatments. Dr. Ridgeon, who has actually discovered a vaccine for tuberculosis, is conflicted about administering his limited remedy, for the husband of a woman he is in love with. It highlights the medical predicament of Shaw's day, that of treating patients with unnecessary practices to earn a living.

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