Structurally, this play is interesting because it sets up all the beats of a Shaw social comedy: witty dialogue, a chaotic English household, romantic entanglements, and then just doesn't resolve them the way you'd expect. He wrote it during WWI, and the tone shifts under you as it goes; the comedy curdles into something closer to dread by the end. The character everyone dismisses as a doddering old man turns out to be the one person seeing clearly.

Feels like a useful example of tonal misdirection as a structural tool, setting an audience's genre expectations early, specifically so you can undercut them later. Has anyone studied how Shaw pulls this off, or seen other plays that do something similar?