This month’s selection from New York’s fall buffet: an old Irish play, a new Irish play, an old English play, and three new American plays.

Shaw was eighty when, in 1936, he started writing Geneva, a sort of morality play in which representatives of political forces of the time are summoned by the League of Nations’ International Committee for Intellectual Co-operation, which was itself located in Geneva, to the Hague to be submitted to the scrutiny of a Judge of the Court of International Justice. Geneva was to go through at least eight versions, one as late as 1945, as Shaw scrambled to keep it timely and politically correct. It was staged first in 1938 in Warsaw, then in London in 1938 and in New York in 1940. It was widely received as an embarrassing failure, and so it is, but the modes of its badness are curious enough to merit the recent revival at the Jean Cocteau Repertory.

I learn with delight from the third and final installment of Michael Holroyd’s Shaw biography that the Committee for Intellectual Co-operation was not a Shavian concoction but an actual arm of the League of Nations chaired successively, in the 1920s, by Henri Bergson and Gilbert Murray. Murray, the classicist and pacifist whom Shaw had drawn on for the character of Adolphus Cusins in Major Barbara(1905), actually declared that the Geneva palavering of his group was “rather like a Shaw play” and asked Shaw to join.