Fanny's First Play

Fanny O'Dowda has written a play. Her father, the old Count, expects something respectable. What she actually stages is a blistering satire of the very critics who've come to judge her. Shaw embeds a drawing-room comedy parody inside a ruthless lampoon of the theatre critics who dismissed his work in real life. The result is a double game: Fanny's play appears prim and proper on the surface while skewering the pretensions of everyone in the audience, including the critics watching it. The longest-running of all Shaw's plays (622 performances in its original London run), Fanny's First Play succeeded partly through its audacious premise: it debuted anonymously, and the guessing game over its authorship became theatrical gossip. Critics eventually recognized Shaw's hand, and the play's real joke landed: the characters they'd been analyzing were caricatures of themselves. It's a comedy about the collision between old money aesthetics and new theatrical ambition, between what fathers expect and what daughters dare to create.