Shaw’s famous antiromantic comedy really needs no introduction, and could not be more of a contrast to Joe Orton’s “entertaining Mrs Shoane”.
the adventures of Raina and her choice between Bluntschli, her ‘ chocolate cream solider’, and Sergius, ‘ a regular handsome fellow with flashing eyes and a lovely moustache, shouting his war cry and charging, like Don Quixote, at the windmills’, is delightful. The cunning manoevres of the servent Nicola and the irrepressible Louka in the household of the Petkoffs (pf whose family Mrs Petoff announces proudly, ‘our position is historical! we can go back for twenty years’) make up one of Shaw’s most sparkling and human comedies.