Mark Bowen

Uncle Vanya is a play by the Russian playwright Anton Chekhov. It was first published in 1898, and was first produced in 1899 by the Moscow Art Theatre under the direction of Konstantin Stanislavski. Uncle Vanya is unique among Chekhov's major plays because it is essentially an extensive reworking of his own play published a decade earlier, The Wood Demon. By elucidating the specific changes Chekhov made during the revision process—these include reducing the cast from almost two dozen down to...

Pygmalion is a play by George Bernard Shaw, named after a Greek mythological figure. Pygmalion was the most broadly appealing of all Shaw's plays. In ancient Greek mythology, Pygmalion fell in love with one of his sculptures, which then came to life. The general idea of that myth was a popular subject for Victorian era British playwrights, including one of Shaw's influences, W. S. Gilbert, who wrote a successful play based on the story called Pygmalion and Galatea that was first presented in...