Farfetched Fables

Farfetched Fables
Written by	George Bernard Shaw
Date premiered	January 13, 1951
Place premiered	Watergate Theatre, London, September 6, 1950 (private) People's Theatre, Newcastle upon Tyne, January 13, 1951 (public)
Original language	English
Subject	Characters discuss ideas for a utopian future
Genre	polemic
Setting	various phases from the present to the far future

Farfetched Fables (1948) is a collection of six short plays by George Bernard Shaw in which he outlines several of his most idiosyncratic personal ideas. The fables are preceded by a long preface. The ideas in the plays and the preface have been called the "violent unabashed prejudices of an eccentric".

Shaw intended to produce a series of plays summing up his own most unfashionable and unpopular ideas. The result is summed up by Archibald Henderson as a hodge-podge of utopian, puritanical and authoritarian concepts:

In his latter years, Shaw appears to have taken seriously some of the fantastic ideas he had conceived in the writing of imaginative literature; and these fancies hardened with the years into fixed convictions:the ultimate redemption of mankind on earth from the burden of the flesh and the ills that flesh is heir to, the elimination of sexual relations and the universal adoption of artificial insemination, the thoroughgoing reorganization of education with the all-embracing tenet of learning by doing, appreciating literature, art, music, sculpture, architecture, by contact experience (reading, seeing, hearing, painting, drawing, sculpting, building), the elimination by gas asphyxiation of the demonstrably immoral and incurably criminal, the extension of the extreme life span roughly from one century to three centuries, elimination of dependence upon food and learning to live on air and water alone, the rewriting of the Prayer Book of the Church of England, the revision of the Scriptures in order to reconcile the irrational dichotomy of the Deity, seen in two separate images in Old and New Testaments, abolition of the party system, expanding the civil service to embrace the highest offices up to and including the Prime Minister, and many other proposals, particularly the devising of a new alphabet--which are, by an incalculable multitude, irrevocably rejected as fads and follies, quirks and crotchets, fancies and fantasies.

The plays take the form of five dialogues and one monologue in which the various topics are discussed.

In the first fable, set shortly after World War II, a Jewish chemist decides that the atomic bomb is too clumsy a weapon, and invents a form of poison gas that is lighter than air.

In the second fable the British government refuses to buy the gas, so the scientist sells it to South Africa, which uses it on London. British politicians are discussing the ways South Africa has been using the gas, but find themselves being eliminated by it. These events unleash a "dark age".

In the third fable, set in a socialist society of the future, scientists have developed techniques to exactly measure human capabilities. Two subjects are tested in the Anthropometric Laboratory by members of the "Upper Ten", a ruling elite. Social status is determined by these scientific tests. Those who are "dangerous and incorrigable" are liquidated.

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Wikipedia