1969 Brooke Bond collectors tea card. depicting: the stage paly Pygmalion and a portrait of George Bernard Shaw (1856  1950). Shaw was an Anglo-Irish playwright. critic and polemicist whose influence on Western theatre. culture and politics extended from the 1880s to his death and beyond. He wrote more than sixty plays. including major works such as Man and Superman (1902). Pygmalion (1912). and Saint Joan (1923).