In March 1896, Bernard Shaw attended in his capacity as theatre reviewer a performance of a rather undistinguished nautical melodrama: True Blue, by Leonard Outram and Stewart Gordon. He conjured for his readers a notable scene in which the female villain, a lady matador, plots to eliminate her rival, who, as a stowaway, has chosen to hide herself in a ship's boiler:

Shaw had long experience with such ‘thrilling pictures’ as this. From youthful trips to the Theatre Royal, Dublin, at which he saw the works of mid-century dramatists including Dion Boucicault, Charles Reade, and Tom Taylor, to his work as a theatre critic for the Saturday Review in the 1890s, Shaw had many opportunities to ponder melodramatic effects. So steeped was he in Victorian popular theatre that, as Martin Meisel has argued, his ‘drama of ideas was a legitimate child of that theater’.

His experience from the start was marked by the kind of doubleness noted earlier, a contrast or interplay between being helplessly gripped by theatrical effect and remaining aware of its artificiality, even absurdity.