Plays Unpleasant | Fiction - www.zzdbook.com

Plays Unpleasant

Feb 23, 2026 5:14 PM

Author:George Bernard Shaw,Dan Laurence,David Edgar

Plays Unpleasant

With Plays Unpleasant, Shaw issued a radical challenge to his audiences' complacency and exposed social evils through his dramatization of the moral conflicts between youthful idealism and economic reality, promiscuity and marriage, and the duties of women to others and to themselves. His first play, Widowers' Houses, depicts Harry Trench's dilemma on learning that the inheritance of his fiancée comes from her father's income as a slum landlord. In The Philanderer, charismatic Leonard Charteris proposes marriage to Grace, while he is still involved with the beautiful Julia Craven - who is not inclined to give him up so easily. And in Mrs Warren's Profession, Vivie Warren is forced to reconsider her own future when she discovers that her mother's immoral earnings funded her genteel upbringing.

Reviews

He is so good at the timely application of those questions that make philosophy interesting... Here at last is someone who can lay these matters out both intelligently and straightforwardly

—— Guardian

Any interested reader will be able to accompany him in his philosophical explorations without losing any of their richness and insight

—— A. C. Grayling , Financial Times

A strange, eloquent and terrifying book

—— Polly Toynbee

The work of a remarkable talent

—— Observer

A writer who provokes almost as much as he entertains

—— Daily Mail

A transcendentally harmonious and compassionate work

—— Times Literary Supplement

A surprisingly tender book... Amid the terror a classic story about love sneaks through: love lost, love imagined, love morphed into madness

—— New York Times Book Review

Beautifully written... It puts a human face on the suffering inflicted by the Taliban... Disturbing and mesmerizing, The Swallows of Kabul will stay with you long after you've finished it

—— San Francisco Chronicle

Riveting... Spare, taut, and pristinely clear prose... An uncanny knack for making moral tension palpable... Extraordinarily moving

—— Philadelphia Inquirer

A novel very much in the tradition of Albert Camus, not only in its humanism and concern with the consequences of individual choices but also in its determination to bear witness to the absurdities of daily life... [A] chilling portrait of fundamentalism run amok and its fallout on ordinary people

—— New York Times

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