Fanny's First Play

London, 1911. The wealthy, impossibly refined Count O'Dowda has commissioned a private theatrical entertainment to please his daughter Fanny, just home from Cambridge — and is mortified to discover that the play she has chosen is one she wrote herself, a raw modern comedy about arrests, disgrace, and the police. To judge it he has hired four distinguished drama critics, who watch the play and then, in the Induction and Epilogue that bracket it, argue at length about who could possibly have written so impertinent a thing — reaching for every famous name in the theatre, one of them swearing it must be Bernard Shaw, while the true author sits among them unsuspected.

The comedy they are judging is a warm, brisk story of respectability under strain. Two prosperous, church-going London families, the Gilbeys and the Knoxes, have arranged that their children shall marry and carry on the family habit of impeccable propriety — until both young people are independently arrested after a riotous night out and sentenced to a fortnight in prison. The parents are shattered; their whole sense of who they are rests on never having been in trouble. What follows is the comic discovery that the disgrace has done the young people nothing but good, and that they return from gaol more honest and more alive than the blameless creatures who went in.

First produced anonymously so that the real London critics had to guess its author in print, Fanny's First Play turned its own first night into the joke it was telling. Having worked for years as a drama critic himself, Shaw knew the breed from the inside, and his quartet of pompous reviewers — together with their confident verdict that no real play could be "by Shaw" — is at once his sharpest satire of theatrical judgment and his most disarming act of self-mockery. It ran for 622 performances and became the longest-running success of his life.

This edition presents the complete public-domain text of the play in clean, readable typesetting prepared for the modern e-reader, with an editor's biographical note, a guide to further reading, and questions for reflection at the back.