‘I had no taste for what is called popular art, no respect for popular morality, no belief in popular religion, no admiration for popular heroics’

With Plays Unpleasant, Shaw challenged his audiences’ moral complacency. In Widowers’ Houses, Harry Trench is engaged to brisk Blanche Sartorius. When he realizes that her father is a slum landlord, Harry questions whether he and Blanche have a future together. In The Philanderer, charismatic Leonard Charteris proposes marriage to Grace, while still involved with the beautiful Julia Craven. But Julia is not inclined to surrender him so easily. While in Mrs Warren’s Profession, Vivie is forced to reconsider the direction of her own life when she discovers that it is her mother’s immoral earnings which have paid for her genteel upbringing.

These plays, as David Edgar says, deal with ‘the conflict between youthful ideals and economic realities, the drawbacks of promiscuity and the perils of matrimony, the duties of women to others and themselves, the necessity for and the costs of revolt. What could be more eternal than that?’