George Bernard Shaw and the Politics of Possibility

A woman coming up from the sea approaches him and asks whether he needs assistance. She asks him if he is a foreigner and why he is not accompanied by a nurse as it is dangerous for people like him to come to this country at this time because of the deadly disease that they have to protect against. He says he is not a foreigner, but a Briton who now lives in the capital of the British Commonwealth, Baghdad and he is part of a delegation of the Prime Minister who has arrived to consult the Oracle at a temple in Ennistymon. The year is 3000 A.D.

That is the opening scene of the play Tragedy of an Elderly Gentleman by George Bernard Shaw. Soon it becomes clear that the Elderly Gentleman is a `short-lifer', nearing the end of the natural lifespan as we know it.

'Think of the position of the Irish, who
had lost all their political faculties by
disuse except that of nationalist
agitation, and who owed their position
as the most interesting race on earth,  
solely to their sufferings!' He said they  
had travelled the world in search of a  
cause but lost their appeal: 'the very  
countries they had set free boycotted  
them as intolerable bores. The  
communities which had once idolized  
them as the incarnation of all that is  
adorable in the warm heart and witty  
brain, fled from them as from a  
pestilence.' Soon nothing was left for
them but to return to Galway Bay but
then: 'the old passionately kissed the
soil of Ireland calling on the young to
embrace the earth that had borne their  
ancestors. But the young looked  
gloomily on and said, "This is no earth  
only stone" ... and all left for England  
the next day; and no Irishman ever  
again confessed to being Irish, even  
to his own children; so that when the  
generation passed away the Irish race  
vanished from human knowledge.' 

Shaw's imagining of this distant future is part of his most ambitious sequence of plays, begun in the final months of the First World War at the height of his disillusionment at the horror and futility of the conflict.