Critic, translator, and playwright Eric Bentley conversed Saturday with New York Post theater columnist Michael Riedel about George Bernard Shaw at the New York Public Library for the Performing Arts. The program was part of a celebration marking the centennial of various Shaw achievements, such as the first performance of “Major Barbara” and “Man and Superman.” Introducing the talk, Alan Pally acknowledged another lesser known anniversary, and said he hoped to make amends to Shaw. “A hundred years ago,” he said, “the New York Public Library restricted access to ‘Man and Superman,'” considering its content too inflammatory. “We’re not like that anymore,” he said to audience laughter.

Mr. Riedel commented on how rarely one sees Shaw produced, and mused whether Shaw’s public persona as a witty jester had overshadowed his reputation as a profound playwright. “When I ask people about Shaw, it’s not so much the plays people talk about. It’s the one-liners people remember: ‘Youth is wasted on the young,’ ‘a government that robs Peter to pay Paul can always count on the support of Paul,’ and my favorite, ‘hell is full of musical amateurs.'”

Mr. Bentley praised Shaw as a thinking playwright – and an incredibly sexual writer – whose dialogues were “erotic flirtation, even when not openly so.” He described Shaw as a dramatist who could be serious without abandoning the light touch, perfectly capable of being trivial and naughty like Noel Coward while at the same time writing tragedy like Goethe or Shakespeare. He had a rare combination of philosophic and histrionic personality, with both a lively and dialectical mind.

Mr. Bentley recalled seeing Shaw performed while in high school. On a trip to London, he saw “Man and Superman,” which had such “charm and cogency” that it could take hold of a 15 year-old who was interested in things such as “Does God exist, and if not, why not?”

Shaw’s energy extended beyond playwriting to musical criticism and political reform. For four years in the 1890s, the Dublin-born figure wrote drama criticism that rejected the conventional Victorian theater of the time. Mr. Bentley, who too was a theater critic for four years (“I copied him”), said that in a way his own drama criticism in the 1950s likewise was a rejection of Broadway theater in New York.

Shaw found a counterforce to the West End theater in championing Ibsen from abroad, whose plays were “the equivalent of off-off Broadway.” Shaw also harbored an animus against Shakespeare for elbowing out other important playwrights: “It was hard for a serious playwright to get a word in edgewise.”

Mr. Riedel asked about Shaw’s later years, when he expressed despair over the world not taking his advice. Mr. Bentley cautioned against taking Shaw literally, as Shaw was an ironist, after all. Shaw played a role in the development of English politics, as a lot of people learned socialism from him. Mr. Bentley referred to a one-volume edition of Shaw’s collected plays, in which Shaw wrote that no one paid attention to him, also suggesting that the “dear reader” read through Shaw’s collected works twice a year.

An audience member asked about the prefaces Shaw wrote. Mr. Bentley said Shaw’s 100-page essay introducing “Androcles and the Lion,” a play about early Christianity, was the playwright’s only pronouncement on the New Testament. In it “he has to tell the life of Jesus and gives his opinions on the Four Gospels. He remarks, for example, that St. Luke was obviously a French novelist.”

The voluble Shaw even performed a preface himself once. He filmed it in 1940 for American audiences of the film “Major Barbara.” Mr. Bentley said Shaw practically stole the show “by making a few simple remarks about the play and the occasion.” Filmed in London during the Battle of Britain, Shaw addressed the American people, saying “a bomb may crash through this roof and blow me to atoms.”

An audience member asked which was Shaw’s favorite of his own plays. Mr. Bentley said “Heartbreak House,” which was also his most pessimistic.

Mr. Bentley described Shaw’s daily schedule at his house in the country, about an hour’s drive from London. Each day Shaw, who lived modestly, would write all morning, sitting in a little wooden hut in the garden. After dinner with his wife in the evening, he would ask for the bag of mail. “Shaw never let anybody else open his mail,” Mr. Bentley said. He would answer any letters that interested him and discard the others.

Mr. Bentley said these letters, some of which are collected in four volumes, are so interesting that he sometimes dips into them when he’s awake late at night with insomnia.

An audience member inquired what Shaw read when he couldn’t sleep at night. Mr. Bentley paused. Mr. Riedel interjected, “Shaw, I imagine.”