She is shocked to learn that war is not about death-defying heroic deeds but rather about getting shot at, and the young man plans to avoid that. To her horror her cherished illusions are challenged when a very ordinary soldier, running from a battle, sneaks through her bedroom window. It's the bedroom of Raina Petkoff, a young lady brimming with starry-eyed romantic notions of war - her fiancé, Sergius, does look so dashing in his sparkling uniform. This sly jab at the pompous pretensions of a hero and at the mealy mouthed platitudes of love is set against the 1885 Serbo-Bulgarian War, and opens appropriately enough in a boudoir. In HCC Central's production of “Arms and the Man,” the tale of blustering bravado, of the triumph of dumb luck over courage, of a pragmatic soldier armed only with chocolate, continues to delight. Shaw would be astonished to see how well his most light-hearted comedy wears its 118 years. He was puzzled to report, “I had the curious experience of witnessing an apparently insane success, with the actors and actresses almost losing their heads with the intoxication of laugh after laugh, and …….I was the only person in the theatre who knew that the whole affair was a ghastly failure.” When “Arms and the Man” opened in 1894, George Bernard Shaw sat in the audience certain that his “flimsy” little play would flop.
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