Arms and the Man (New Mermaids) - Softcover

Shaw, Bernard

Softcover

ISBN 10: 0713679980 ISBN 13: 9780713679984

Publisher: Methuen Drama, 2008

Synopsis

"What use are cartridges in battle? I always carry chocolate instead."

Cheered by some and booed by others on opening night in 1894, Arms and the Man became the first success of Bernard Shaw's dramatic career that spanned six decades and brought him world-wide renown. In this perennially popular anti-romantic comedy, a fugitive enemy soldier bursts into the bedroom of a starry-eyed young woman; he then proceeds to disabuse her and those around her of the bogus romanticised ideals they have constructed around love, war, and social status.

This edition includes Shaw's definitive text and provides the most comprehensive scholarly treatment of the play to date. It radically re-examines Shaw's sources, the drafts of the play, its themes and self-fictionalising techniques, and locates it in the theatrical milieu that Shaw sought to subvert and revolutionize.

About this title

From the Back Cover:

In the opening scene of Arms and the Man, which establishes the play's embattled Balkan setting, young Raina learns of her suitor's heroic exploits in combat. She rhapsodizes that it is "a glorious world for women who can see its glory and men who can act its romance!" Soon, however, such romantic falsifications of love and warfare are brilliantly and at times hilariously unmasked in a comedy that reveals George Bernard Shaw at his best as an acute social observer and witty provocateur.
First produced on the London stage in 1894, Arms and the Man continues to be among the most performed of Shaw's plays around the world. The play is reprinted in its entirety here from an authoritative British edition, and is complete with Shaw's stimulating preface to Volume II of Plays: Pleasant and Unpleasant.

From the Inside Flap:

It's 1885, and Raina's bourgeois Bulgarian family is caught up in the heady patriotism of the war with Serbia. The beautiful, headstrong Raina eagerly awaits her fianc 's victorious return from battle - but instead meets a soldier who seeks asylum in her bedroom. This is one soldier who definitely prefers romance and chocolate to fear and bullets. War may be raging on the battlefield, but it's the battle of the sexes that heats up this extraordinary comedy and offers very different notions of love and war.

An L.A. Theatre Works full-cast performance featuring Al Espinosa, Jeremy Sisto, Teri Garr, Anne Heche, Micahel Winters, Jason Kravits and Sarah Rafferty.

About this edition

• Publisher: Methuen Drama
• Publication date: 2008
• ISBN 10: 0713679980
• ISBN 13: 9780713679984
• Binding: Paperback
• Number of pages: 176
• Editor: Wearing J. P.