Shaw is the missing link between Wilde and Brecht. He combines his fellow Irishman's wit with the German dramatist's political ferocity. The result, as Sam Walters's intoxicating revival of Major Barbara proves, is a heady brew that makes all the weirder the neglect of Shaw on the 150th anniversary of his birth.
I had forgotten how Wildean Major Barbara is. Where The Importance of Being Earnest depends on a foundling discovering his parentage, Shaw's play hinges on a professor of Greek proving he is a foundling in order to inherit the Undershaft armaments business. Andrew Undershaft's insistence that poverty is the ultimate crime, and that society's first duty is to ensure that everyone is decently fed and housed, anticipates by a quarter century Brecht's great dictum in The Threepenny Opera: "Food comes first, then morals."
At the heart of this play is the extraordinary intense kinship between Undershaft and his salvationist daughter, Barbara; when the latter's wooer, Adolphus Cusins, says that "a father's love for his grown-up daughter is the most dangerous of all infatuations", he speaks a shattering truth. While Cusins' final acceptance of the Undershaft inheritance can be seen as a union between idealism and realism, it also hints at something far more explosive. For all Cusins' utopian determination to "make war on war", the play demonstrates all too clearly what Michael Holroyd calls "Shaw's growing obsession with power".
Robert Austin's Undershaft is both yearning father and smooth apologist for the international arms trade. Octavia Walters's Barbara likewise combines Salvation Army spirituality with a genetically implanted steeliness. David Antrobus is an outstanding Cusins, and Jacqueline King as Undershaft's overbearingly aristocratic wife gives us Lady Bracknell in all but name. Even Shaw-haters would have to admit there is no more invigorating play in London.
· Until December 16. Box office: 020-8940 3633.
