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Theatre

Why George Bernard Shaw was an overrated babbler

Plus: a revival of Patrick Marber’s modern classic Closer, in which Rufus Sewell looks like a Botticelli angel on crack

7 March 2015

9:00 AM

7 March 2015

9:00 AM

Man and Superman

Lyttelton, in rep until 17 May

Closer

Donmar Warehouse, until 4 April

When I was a kid, I was taught by a kindly old Jesuit whose youth had been beguiled by George Bernard Shaw. The provocative ironies of ‘GBS’ were quoted everywhere and he was, for several decades, the world’s leading public intellectual. But as a schoolboy I found it hard to assent to the infatuations of my elders and though I relished Shaw’s aphorisms (‘we learn from history that we learn nothing from history’) I conceived a suspicion that he was smug and overrated.

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