Whether he was, as AE described him, "the last saint sent out of Ireland to save the world", is highly debatable but George Bernard Shaw was certainly one of the leading figures of 20th century drama. At one time, he was believed to be the most frequently and widely produced English-language dramatist after Shakespeare, and in his lifetime his name attained a kind of celebrity status.
Today marks the 150th anniversary of his birth in Dublin, a city for which he retained fond affection throughout his long life, and yet the occasion has shamefully merited no attention from our main theatres, although the National Gallery is, appropriately for a teetotaller, holding a public tea party - and an exhibition - to honour a benefactor whose funding bequest has enriched its collection.
Shaw was a man of multiple talents: a discerning music and theatre critic, a strongly opinionated wit, a socialist and pacifist of utter conviction, as well as being a forerunner for the anti-vivisection movement and Ireland's first Nobel Prize winner.
His claim to recognition was, and remains, mainly through his better known works for the stage - Man and Superman, Heartbreak Hotel, Mrs Warren's Profession, Arms and the Man and Pygmalion which won him a Hollywood Oscar. He recovered defiantly from early rejection - five novels turned down by publishers - and the failure of his first plays to earn even modest critical acclaim.
Yet he went on to become "the professional man of genius" he set out to be. Few playwrights have expanded the repertoire of modern theatre to quite the same extent as GBS. His output as a critic, political commentator and polemicist was equally prodigious: a man of letters in the truest sense.
His plays were generally centred around some moral or social issue and adhered to his own ideological outlook as a Fabian socialist. He was never short of an opinion and, whether on stage or on the page, he set out to provoke and challenge. Some of his observations - "England and America are two countries divided by a common language" - remain as sharp today as when first made.
Although he left Ireland before he was twenty, he never forgot that he was an Irishman - a fact, he once said, which filled him with inextinguishable pride. Shaw has not achieved the same living presence on the Irish stage as, say, Synge or O'Casey. Nonetheless the best of his work deserves its place in theatrical immortality and his reputation here deserves some measure of restoration. A production of at least one of his plays during this anniversary would have been a good start.