Arms and the Man

This is a delightful comedy that I always enjoy, and maybe someday I'll give it five stars.

It has fun on the subjects of military glory, honour, and romance, contrasting them with practicality and good sense; this is probably less subversive now than in 1894 (when the play was first performed), but it remains entertaining and deftly written, and the various characters involved are congenial in their different ways.

It's a play in three acts; if you read the script rather than watching a performance, the whole thing is the length of a short novella, so it doesn't take long to read.

The story is set in an unnamed small town near the Dragoman Pass. Dragoman is in western Bulgaria, near the Serbian border. Out of curiosity, I looked up the other place names mentioned in the play. Phillipopolis is a misspelling of Phillippopolis, the old name of Plovdiv, Bulgaria's second city after Sofia (the capital). Lom Palanka is the old name of the town now just called Lom, in north-west Bulgaria, on the Romanian border. I don't find Teemok, but the Timok river is in north-west Bulgaria, running along the Serbian border.