My unreasonably fair lady

Ask anyone to name an Irish author and you might get Oscar Wilde and George Bernard Shaw. And

not much else.

But if you were to ask the Man on the Clapham Omnibus to name anything written by Shaw you might get ‘My Fair Lady’.

It wasn’t.

That was Lerner and Loewe.

But he did write ‘Pygmalion’, the play on which the musical is based.

His name might be famous but famous for what.

Yet this was a man who wrote more than 60 plays.

Including ‘Man and Superman’, ‘Arms and the man’, ‘Major Barbara’, and ‘Saint Joan’.

And he is the only person to have been awarded a Nobel Prize (for literature) and an Oscar (for best adapted screenplay) for his film adaptation of his play ’Pygmalion’.

He had nothing to do with ‘My Fair Lady’ which appeared 3 years after his death.

But Shaw was far more than a playwright.

He wanted to change society, not through revolution, but through a gradual promotion of socialism.

He was a leading light in the Fabian Society which became the foundation philosophy of the Labour Party

He was a man of vision and championed many causes unpopular at the time but which we now take for granted.

He wanted to change society, to change the world, to make it a better place.

A man determined to leave his thumbprint on the world around him.

He spoke for a woman’s right to vote which begat Margaret Thatcher.

He promoted universal healthcare which begat the NHS.

He championed a minimum wage which begat the Living Wage, a cause now taken up by George Osborne.

And he sought the abolition of hereditary privilege which begat the introduction of Life Peers.

He helped establish the London School of Economics.

After death he even funded a new alphabet, the Shavian Alphabet, to address the vagaries of English spelling.

He was not a man to accept the world as it was.

He wanted a better world, a different world. He wanted society, the world to change, to progress. And he would use his skills as a writer, as an essayist and a lecturer to bring this about.

But his most impactful words appear in ‘Maxims for Revolutionaries’ in ‘Man and Superman’:

‘The reasonable adapts himself to the conditions around him. The unreasonable man adapts surrounding conditions to himself. All progress depends on the unreasonable man’

You might describe these words as at the heart of Shaw’s approach to life.

And a philosophy adopted at great personal cost by Rosa Parks to end segregation in America; by Nelson Mandela to end apartheid; even by Tim Berners Lee to improve our lives through the World Wide Web.

This has to be the most important quote in the world. Ever. For anyone wanting to challenge and change.

And that is why it behoves us all to be unreasonable. To adapt the world to ourselves. In everything we do.

How unreasonable are you going to be today?