Join today and start reading your favorite books for Free!
Rate this book!
Write a review?
Major Barbara a pre-WWI play (1905) by George Bernard Shaw is essentially a kind of battle of wits between a father, Undershaft, who is an obscenely wealthy weapons-maker and his estranged daughter, Barbara, who is a Major in the Salvation Army. Dad, after several years, has come home and everyone really despises him. Undershaft is without principles; he’ll shaft anyone if he can make a few bucks from it. While her religion is Chistianity--she only cares about saving souls--his religion is capit...
Absolutely adored the humour in this and I think it really does stand the test of time and many people would really enjoy it today, as it kind of still fits our society.
A witty but devastatingly subversive play which mocks Christianity in general and the Salvation Army in particular. And as is always the case with Shaw, it comes with a long-winded, preachy preface designed to hammer home the author's ideology, just in case the stupid reader did not get it from the play.
A brilliant summation of the place of capital in war-mongering and peace-striving. The Salvation Army proposes peace, but in order to keep the charity going to support peace, Major Barbara elicits contributions from her father Undershaft the munitions maker. Undershaft is the perfect representative of the "military-industrial complex," to use Eisenhower's term. Peace itself depends upon Undershaft and his war manufactures. Read as a college freshman, struck with Shaw's insight and character port...
Read this at uni and saw various productions of this drama. I never get tired of George Bernard Shaw. He holds up common prejudices and social norms to ridicule, then shows us a better way to think and believe. Quite the snake charmer, was Shaw, but he kept us laughing while he tried to reform us!
From BBC Radio 4 - DramaAfter a long absence George Bernard Shaw returns to the Radio 4 airwaves in this new 2 part drama. Starring Eleanor Tomlinson as Barbara and Rebecca Front as Lady Britomart. 1/2: Barbara's mission is to save East End souls in the West Ham Salvation shelter. A tale of rich privilege and a battle of wills. All wrapped up in a romance, the return of a long lost father and a little matter of finding a foundling to carry on the Undershaftarms and gunpowder empire.2/2: While Ba...
“You cannot have power for good without having power for evil too. Even mother's milk nourishes murderers as well as heroes.”
Always on the lookout for more clever and interesting plays to read, I stumbled across George Bernard Shaw’s Pygmalion a couple of years back, not realizing that it was pretty much the verbatim origin of the classic My Fair Lady. I wanted to read more Shaw! The next thing I knew, our theater arts teacher told me that he spent the summer reading Major Barbara. And who is that by? I asked. Why, George Bernard Shaw, he answered.And here we are.Shaw does not disappoint. He has a very incisive mind,
First of all, I'd like to mention that 'Major Barbara' just like the female protagonist of the play, 'saved my soul' not through the salvation army but by being the first book I had read in almost a fortnight! The depression that had followed was unbearable and 'Major Barbara' literally pulled me out of it today, when I started reading it again! Now about the play: You read a lot of plays. Some are tragic, some are comic and some are simply Shavian. You go about the world, with your own notion...
Honestly smitten ....Who'd have thought it-a play about the Sallies mixed in with a munitions manufacturer! But seriously, this is a play with a beating heart and sympathetic socialist brain which, for once, isn't clouded in rhetoric. There's for once, the spectre of life imitating art; Alfred Nobel, Carnegie, Cadbury, Krupp, all those kingpins of industry who turned to philanthropy in their dotage. Who refused their tainted money? Hospitals, academic institutions, charities...no, they couldn't
"Major Barbara" is a great play for the Shaw Festival where it is performed on a regular basis. It poses the question that remains as relevant in the 21st century as it was when the play was first performed in the first decade of the 20th century: that is to say which is worse: making weapons of mass destruction or promoting a religion. For Shaw, a socialist, the answer is obvious. Religion is the opium of the people which diverts their attention from the real problems that must be dealt with; w...
I really like this play. Shaw pushes the boundary of society. Answers our darkest questions about society without any remorse or fear. This play bashes all the "do-gooders" out there by essentially saying "Yes you do good. But is it really good is it causing more harm? How can you stand in the light smiling whilst shaking hands with the dark? The same dark that you spit on."It's a play that really gets you thinking about the way society is built. Are our actions of good really befitting the soci...
When we talk about God, by extension we are talking about poverty, illiteracy, weakness, and suffering. Wealth is a source of happiness, arrogance, pride, and oppression. The former view is held by Mr. Undershaft while the latter view by he daughter, Barbara. Question is, can we all be wealthy? Can we aolish poverty? Gearge Bernard Shaw thinks we can. He proposes the introduction of the minimum wage for everyone. He through Mr. Undershaft believes that poverty is the worst crime on earth. Barbar...
This is a play about capitalism verses human rights, about the military industrial complex, what religion is really about, and what is right and wrong. Yet, this play was written over a hundred years ago, yet is as fresh as if it were written today. There will not be a reader or viewer, despite their political or religious leanings, that will not have at least one long cherished belief challenged to its core. Many plays are cotton candy, this is a meat and potatoes play. Lastly, you will laugh a...
I last read this play as a teenager, and I don't remember it as well as I would ideally wish. I recall the moral as being, roughly, that the Christian world-view was entirely compatible with the ethos of the military-industrial complex. Can that really be right? Maybe there was some level of irony I wasn't properly getting? I should re-read it. But, ironic or not, full marks to Shaw for prescience: the term "military-industrial complex" wouldn't even be invented for another few decades, and I do...
Entertaining but deeper than I expected. Thought-provoking!
After reading so many plays by Shaw, I liked only this play, In it i like Shaw the satiric but not necessarily Shaw the intellectual, although i preference socialism, but have an unrest about the the western Europeans - and Americans - Socialists specially the celebrity ones.Back to the play, I think the most remarkable element about it is its characters, Shaw's sarcasm of every one - except maybe Undershaft - is clear - at least for me. In this screen version he is free to present the scenes as...
from Bernard Shaw’s Major BarbaraAct II, Scene ICUSINS. Pardon me. We were discussing religion. Why go back to such an uninteresting and unimportant subjectas business?UNDERSHAFT. Religion is our business at present, because it is through religion alone that we can win Barbara.[…] Keep to the point. We have to win her; and we are neither of us Methodists.CUSINS. That doesn't matter. The power Barbara wields here—the power that wields Barbara herself—is notCalvinism, not Presbyterianism, not Meth...
This is the first play /work by Shaw that I read, and I liked it so much, even it is old written in 1905. I am going to read his other plays and novels. Well I am going to read it again and may be I will edit this review.-------------------------------- If God Gave the Hand, Let Not Man Withold the Sword. All Have the Right to Fight: None Have the Right to Judge. To Man the Weapon: To Heaven the Victory. --------------------------------Beautiful!!!Having said this, The play Major Barbara...