This compendium summarizes the first three acts of George Bernard Shaw’s play Major Barbara, presenting principal characters, narrative progression, and central themes with editorial clarity.

Setting and principal figures
The play opens in the London household of Lady Britomart Undershaft and proceeds to a Salvation Army shelter in West Ham and to Andrew Undershaft’s Perivale St. Andrews armaments works. Key characters are Lady Britomart (managing, socially conventional matron), her son Stephen (conscientious, idealistic), daughters Sarah (worldly) and Barbara (Major in the Salvation Army), Andrew Undershaft (Barbara’s father; a successful, unapologetic munitions manufacturer), Adolphus “Dolly” Cusins (a professorial intellectual in love with Barbara), and Charles Lomax (Sarah’s suitor). Secondary figures populate the shelter—Salvationists and destitute clients—whose situations foreground the play’s social concerns.

Plot outline
Act I establishes family tensions: Lady Britomart seeks financial support from Andrew so her daughters’ marriages and households can be sustained. Stephen recoils from his father’s business, but Lady Britomart, pragmatic and socially ambitious, arranges a visit by Andrew to assess the girls. Andrew arrives with genial force; his readiness to enter the domestic circle unsettles the family while he reveals a worldview that normalizes and even sanctifies his trade.

Act II shifts to the West Ham shelter, illustrating the Salvation Army’s social ministry and the material poverty it confronts. Barbara commands respect among the poor; Cusins, smitten, oscillates between intellectual irony and genuine commitment. Andrew visits, converses with Barbara, and strikingly offers money to the Army. Barbara recoils at the moral compromise when charity is tied to funds from profiteers (notably Lord Saxmundham/Bodger, a whisky-maker), briefly deserting the Army. Undershaft’s cheque, however, is accepted by others, prompting Barbara’s crisis.

Act III returns to Wilton Crescent and moves to Undershaft’s works. Cusins confesses that, by reason of a technical illegitimacy, he can be classed as the requisite “foundling” and therefore eligible to succeed Undershaft; he bargains for generous terms and accepts. Barbara confronts the ethical paradox of reconciling spiritual aims with material power. Undershaft argues that money and force (his “religion”: money and gunpowder) are instruments to lift people from poverty; Barbara, while horrified by the means, recognizes the potential to wield power for human betterment and resolves—ambivalently—to engage with the factory of death in order to realize higher ends.

Themes and significance
Shaw stages a sustained dialectic between moral idealism and pragmatic power: charity versus complicity, spiritual authority versus economic coercion, and the social function of violence and capital. Characters personify conflicting answers to social reform: compassion and doctrinal purity (Barbara, Salvationists), social respectability (Lady Britomart), political idealism (Stephen), and instrumental realism (Undershaft). The play interrogates whether ends justify means and whether modern salvation requires control of the material instruments that shape society.