About the work
Major Barbara is a play in three acts by George Bernard Shaw, premiered in London in 1905. This astute discussion comedy poses the provocative question of the relationship between morality, poverty, and money, and is typical of Shaw's art of casting social debates in sparkling dialogue.
Plot
Barbara Undershaft is a major in the Salvation Army and devotes her life to saving the poor. Her estranged father Andrew Undershaft, by contrast, is an immensely wealthy arms manufacturer. Quarrelling over the right path to improving the world, father and daughter make a wager: each is to visit the other's world. When Barbara must realise that the Salvation Army readily accepts the money of distillers and arms dealers, her moral worldview begins to waver. Undershaft argues that poverty is the greatest evil—and that true morality begins only once hunger is defeated.
Cultural significance
Major Barbara is one of Shaw's most important dramas of ideas and is striking for its paradoxical thesis that economic power and prosperity are the precondition for any effective morality. With wit and intellectual sharpness, Shaw sets pious charity against capitalist reality without offering easy answers. The play is part of the standard repertoire and is regarded as a model of Shaw's uncomfortable, dialectical dramaturgy.