The Plays Pleasant enact this characteristic. One can range the characters chronologically in their settings. First we meet Napoleon in 1796, as he anticipates his own fate at the hands of an Irishman. Then there is a leap to very different kinds of soldiers, the chocolate-eating anti-hero of 1885 in Arms and the Man. The location is now Bulgaria, rather broadly depicted. The next movement crosses a nine-year gap until 1894 when we meet Candida in north-east London, Hackney to be precise. Finally, a two-year step unites us with the cast of You Never Can Tell at a coastal resort in Devon, the date being 1896. Shaw is very exact with these dates, inscribing each one in the opening stage-directions. It is a frightening acceleration of history.

The locations are pretty dizzying too. Considered as a French general, Napoleon in Italy exemplifies the imperial, invasive power of the Revolution. Considered as a Corsican, he is more at home at Tavazzano on the road from Lodi to Milan. Emphatically, he is on the move, though brought up short by the mysterious Lady. Bulgaria in 1885 was ruled by Alexander Battenberg, who, in that very year, absorbed eastern Rumelia into the state. Rumelia sounds no closer to reality than the Ruritania of Anthony Hope’s escapist novel, The Prisoner of Zenda (1893). But the bloody complexities of Balkan politics had impacted on British affairs in these years. It was Turkish atrocities in Bulgaria which drew W. E. Gladstone out of retirement in 1875, to chide Prime Minister Disraeli for his complacency. Arguably, this decision produced the great Gladstonian conversion to Irish Home Rule and the crisis of 1891 when Charles Stewart Parnell died amid heated debates about divorce, morality and Catholicism. That brings us to a dentist’s surgery in torrid Torbay, the setting of Act One in You Never Can Tell. But before the audience has settled into its seats, the English riviera is disclosed as the resort of Madeirans, recycled ex-patriots as it were. Perpetual mobility.

That leaves Candida, which (like the poor) is always with us, unquestionably the best play of the four. In a typically prolix stage-direction, Shaw sets the scene in ‘the north east quarter of London, a vast district miles away from the London of Mayfair and St James’s, and much less narrow, squalid, fetid and airless in its slums’. Here the Fabian local councillor is clearly audible, attacking Mayfair not for exploiting slums but for being (in a spiritual sense) a slum in itself. The great feature of Shaw’s suburban setting is Victoria Park, splendidly visible to the Reverend James Mavor Morell from his windows. The action is about to begin, all three Acts taking place inside the parsonage. So – in keeping with Shaw’s own principles – let us turn face-about and concentrate on Victoria Park.

A few years after the young Queen’s narrow escape outside the Fox and Crown, thirty thousand residents petitioned her, seeking recreational facilities which might, in time, be named in her honour. In 1845, the park was opened though plans for luxury housing (the price still paid for a public amenity) did not come to fruition. Nevertheless, about seven hundred fruit trees were axed, to cheat local children of apples and general enjoyment of the new open spaces. Ornamental trees were planted instead, and Shaw’s stage-setting describes the scene fifty years later.