Bernard Shaw’s Stalinist Allegory: The Simpleton of the Unexpected Isles

For over fifty years, playwright George Bernard Shaw called for the state extermination of the incorrigibly criminal or anti-social. Yet these statements have usually been dismissed as expressions of Shaw’s well-known propensity for comic exaggeration and hyperbole, his pugnacious rhetoric, his love of paradox, and especially, his addiction to antagonizing the British political establishment. Nonetheless, as this article shows, Shaw was not joking, and in fact, gave full support to the liquidation policies that arose in the totalitarian countries in the thirties, especially those in the Soviet Union. His 1934 play The Simpleton of the Unexpected Isles, although rarely recognized as such, is actually an allegory of the Soviet Union that gives especial attention to the totalitarian state’s uncompromising policy of disposing of recalcitrant citizens. The article analyses the play in light of Shaw’s 1931 visit to the Soviet Union and his vociferous support of its political agenda under Stalin.