Reviewing a 1987 production of Major Barbara at that year's Shaw Festival in Ontario, Canada, O'Neill affirms the theatrical power of Shaw's play, calling the production the highlight of the festival.

Genuine theatrical salvation for Major Barbara, perhaps Bernard Shaw's most relentless discussion for the stage, is the chief pleasure of the 1987 Shaw Festival where huge and handsome, if unadventuresome, productions are often the rule. As conceived by Christopher Newton, who also serves as the festival's artistic director, Major Barbara finds in the spectacle of its staging a visual accompaniment for the dazzling brilliance of Shaw's ideas.

Major Barbara has been directed with the scope and vision of opera, thereby revealing yet another key to a play in which Shaw, the music critic and great arbiter of the western artistic heritage, provides a symphony of thought articulated and debated in the intellectual duets of Undershaft and Cusins and...