In 2025, a play by George Bernard Shaw seems an unlikely candidate for urgent, contemporary theatre. After all, in this age of attention fracking, doomscrolling and artificial intelligence, who has the patience for the playwright’s notoriously lengthy, idea-dense verbal wrestling matches? In this light, director Peter Hinton-Davis’ stripped-down, visually striking and sonically amplified production of Major Barbara at the Shaw Festival achieves something remarkable. It transforms this 1905 work into an experience that is startlingly modern and supremely engaging, and whose essential conflicts and its trenchant commentary feel ripped from today’s headlines.
Written during Shaw’s most productive period, Major Barbara emerged when the playwright was at the height of his powers as social critic and provocateur. The play opens as Lady Britomart Undershaft summons her estranged husband, wealthy munitions manufacturer Andrew Undershaft, to discuss financial support for their adult children. Their reunion brings together a fractured family: daughter Barbara, a passionate Major in the Salvation Army dedicated to saving souls; her fiancé Adolphus Cusins, a shrewd professor of Greek literature; and their practically-minded son Stephen, who is caught between his mother’s aristocratic values and his father’s industrial empire.
The play’s dramatic engine is set in motion by a provocative wager: Undershaft bets Barbara that if she visits his munitions factory, he can convert her to his materialistic philosophy, while she counters that a visit to her Salvation Army shelter will convince him of the power of spiritual salvation. This bet sets up the play’s physical and philosophical journey through these contrasting worlds, where each location becomes a battlefield for their competing visions of human progress. The stakes of this wager mount steadily. First, Barbara and the Salvation Army shelter faces a moral crisis over accepting “tainted” money from Undershaft and a whiskey distiller, forcing Barbara to confront the compromises required to maintain her idealistic mission. Then in their visit to Undershaft’s munitions factory, he demonstrates that his “religion of money and gunpowder” has created better living conditions for his workers than Barbara’s spiritual charity ever could — with notable and different effects on Barbara, Cusins, Stephen and Lady Britomart.
Hinton-Davis stages this war of ideas on Gillian Gallow’s sparse and striking set, which serves as both arena and metaphor. The stage, painted in deep, cool blue, features towering walls flanked by oversized steps on either side. The characters must physically descend these steps to enter the playing space – making a deliberate and effortful journey down into the stage’s combat zone of ideas. Secondary characters sometimes perch on these stairs as spectators to and commenters on the intellectual gladiatorial matches that take place below. With simple addition and subtraction — of strategically placed chairs, a table, or rows of sleek bombs; plus simple and striking wall adornments — this abstract crucible transforms from Lady Britomart’s library to the Salvation Army shelter to Undershaft’s munitions factory. The ideas are paramount: each location is simply a fresh battlefield for their exchange.
The production’s sonic landscape is equally compelling. The cast frame each act with period songs and oddly cadenced announcements, their voices creating harmonies that refract the play’s moral dissonance. And low background rumbles – thunder, maybe bombs – create an ominous undertone that grows more pronounced as the play progresses.
And in the foreground, Hinton-Davis turns the zealotry of his cast members up to 11 – there is a differently inflected religious fervor to their pronouncements, but the volume, the passion and the speed of their deliveries are an equal and inescapable part of the production’s aural tapestry. Patrick Galligan delivers a magnificent performance as Undershaft, capitalism’s most eloquent and reasonable-seeming advocate. His intense presence and perverse proselytizing (he gets all the best lines) are simply magnetic, and the joy he experiences as his prospective son-in-law Cusins reveals his potential to out-Machiavelli him, is delicious.
Galligan’s performance alone is reason enough to see this production, though there are other substantial riches here. Gabriella Sundar Singh’s Major Barbara matches him with fierce intensity and a sometimes shouty urgency, which modulates after her long silence at the start of Act 3 into a more pragmatic but equally fervent zeal. And Andre Morin’s Cusins provides a perfectly calibrated counterpoint as the deceptively laid-back scholar, whose classical knowledge and laconic delivery mask a pragmatic modern mind and a zealous pursuit of Barbara that will simply not be denied. The supporting cast proves equally compelling. Fiona Byrne’s Lady Britomart offers steel-spined pragmatism amid the zealotry, while Taurian Teelucksingh transforms Stephen from upper-class cipher into earnestly confused and then converted moral seeker. Patty Jamieson, Sepehr Reybod, and Lindsay Wu round out the ensemble with sharp character work.
But what makes this Major Barbara most striking is how presciently and thoroughly it addresses urgent contemporary concerns. In the characters and their debates in that cool blue arena, it both lacerates and complexifies the military-industrial complex, the forces of religion, the entrenched self-satisfaction of the ruling class, and even the nature and value of higher education – topics that in 2025 drive social media broadsides, legacy media headlines, protests, and yes, even wars
“Whatever can blow man up, can blow society up. The history of the world is the history of those who had courage to embrace that truth.” This is the ultimate seductive challenge offered by the devil Undershaft: the possibility of harnessing these corrupt systems — of industry, religion, family wealth and education — for angelic ends. This challenge is one that all of the characters in different ways accept. And it feels especially pointed, in our era of acute ethical compromise and moral uncertainty. As the bombs sound and the cast sing Shaw’s funhouse version of the Lord’s Prayer, the play suggests the inevitability of this ambition, the seduction of the attempt … and the unlikelihood of achieving what is desired.
In making this 120-year-old play speak so directly and clearly to our moment, Hinton-Davis and company have achieved something remarkable: they’ve made Shaw’s verbose philosophical arguments feel as immediate and urgent as a breaking news alert on our endlessly scrolling screens.
Major Barbara is on stage at the Shaw Festival’s Royal George Theatre until October 5, 2025. Tickets are available on shawfest.com.
© Scott Sneddon, Sesaya Arts Magazine 2025
