Fanny’s First Play

A wealthy young woman writes a play and, keeping her authorship secret, hires professional actors to perform it before a panel of London’s leading drama critics, whom Shaw draws as thinly veiled caricatures of the real reviewers of his day. That comic frame surrounds the inner play itself, in which two respectable middle-class families are scandalized when their well-behaved grown children each land briefly in jail and come home changed. Shaw uses the double structure to mock both the theatre establishment and the stuffy morality of Edwardian parents. Light on its feet and quick with its jokes, it became one of his longest-running early hits. First produced in 1911, it remains an enjoyable satire. This free PDF and EPUB edition presents the complete text.