Fanny's First Play
1915
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.
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“It's all that the young can do for the old, to shock them and keep them up to date.””
— Bernard Shaw
“The word morality, if we met it in the Bible, would surprise us as much as the word telephone or motor car.””
— Bernard Shaw
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Shaw, Bernard. Fanny's First Play. Lex, lex-books.com/book/fanny-s-first-play-0916f68a-5334-4d7b-8211-b071e97c94fa.Shaw, B. (1915). Fanny's First Play. Lex. https://lex-books.com/book/fanny-s-first-play-0916f68a-5334-4d7b-8211-b071e97c94faShaw, Bernard. Fanny's First Play. Lex. https://lex-books.com/book/fanny-s-first-play-0916f68a-5334-4d7b-8211-b071e97c94fa.
