Man and Superman

A hilarious cocktail of Victorian farce and Nietzschean philosophy, Man and Superman inverts the myth of Don Juan to portray “the tragi-comic love chase of the man by the woman.” John Tanner, an earnest young revolutionary, flees to the Sierra Nevada when he discovers that his beautiful ward has plans to marry him. Captured by a band of international brigands, Tanner eventually falls asleep, and dreams up to a sparkling Shavian debate between Don Juan, the Devil, and a rather talkative statue. With a fairy tale ending and a cast fresh from hell, Man and Superman is one of Shaw’s finest and most devilishly witty comedies.

SYNOPSIS

John Tanner, a young, radical writer, is named along with Roebuck Ramsden, an antideluvian conservative, to be the guardian of the attractive and wealthy Ann Whitefield. When Tanner realizes that Ann loves him, he orders his chauffeur Straker to drive to Spain to avoid marrying her. But Ann follows in hot pursuit, and, while in the Sierra Nevada, Tanner and Straker encounter a group of rebels headed by an appealing Mephistophelean outlaw named Mendoza. In the mountains, Tanner has a dream (the “Don Juan in Hell” sequence). In his dream John becomes Don Juan, Ann, his former love, Doña Ana, and Mendoza, the devil. Back in the real world, Ann catches up to the entourage, traps John into marriage, and the audience is left to assume that the couple’s perfect match will produce superior children, which was the Life Force’s master plan all along.