Man and Superman Man and Superman Man and Superman is a four-act drama written by George Bernard Shaw in 1903. The series was written in response to a call for Shaw to write a play based on the Don Juan theme. "Man and Superman" opened at the Royal Court Theatre in London on 23 May 1905, but it omitted the third act. A part of the act, "Don Juan in Hell" (Act 3, Scene 2), was performed when the drama was staged on 4 June 1907 at the Royal Court. The play was not performed in its entirety until 1915, when the Travelling
Man and Superman play as a 58-page appendix. Both in the play and in the "Handbook" Shaw takes Nietzsche's theme that mankind is evolving, through natural selection, towards "superman" and develops the argument to suggest that the prime mover in selection is the woman: Ann Whitefield makes persistent efforts to entice Tanner to marry her yet he remains a bachelor. As Shaw himself puts it: "Don Juan had changed his sex and become Dona Juana, breaking out of the Doll's House and asserting herself as an individual". This is an explicit, intended reversal of Da Ponte's "Don Giovanni"; here Ann, representing Doña Ana,