Man and Superman

John Tanner is horrified to discover that he is the object of Ann Whitefield's ambitions in her search for a satisfactory husband. For Tanner, political pamphleteer and independent mind, escape is the only option. But Ann is grimly resigned to society's expectations and ready for the chase. In this caustic satire on romantic conventions, Shaw casts his net wide across European culture to draw on works by Mozart, Nietzsche and Conan Doyle for his re-telling of the Don Juan myth. As Stanley Weintraub comments, it was Shaw's ability to combine popular comedy with intellectual seriousness that made Man and Superman 'the first great twentieth-century English play', and one that remains a classic expose of the eternal struggle between the sexes.