It describes a summit meeting designed to contain the increasingly dangerous behaviour of three dictators, Herr Battler, Signor Bombardone, and General Flanco (parodies of Adolf Hitler, Benito Mussolini and Francisco Franco).
Because of its topicality in the run up to World War II, the play was constantly rewritten by Shaw to take account of rapidly changing events.
At the offices of the "Committee of Intellectual Cooperation" in Geneva, the only person present is a hopelessly overwhelmed secretary called Miss Begonia Brown.
Various people turn up demanding redress of grievances: a Jew who complains of oppression in Germany; a colonial politician who had been denied the right to take his seat and a South American woman who objects to the politics of assassinations and vendettas.
The judge comments, "It turns out that we do not and cannot love one another—that the problem before us is how to establish peace among people who heartily dislike one another, and have very good reasons for doing so: in short, that the human race does not at present consist exclusively or even largely of likeable persons".
Sir Orpheus Midlander, the British Foreign Secretary, threatens Battler that if Germany invades another country, Britain will take military action.
Shaw said he had already rewritten it to adopt as more critical stance: "Musso let me down completely by going anti-Semite on me...you may now put the copy I sent you in the fire as useless.
"[2] Beatrice Webb disliked what she heard when Shaw read passages from a draft of Geneva in 1936, writing "every character depraved in morals and manners and futile in intellect, with here and there a dull dissertation on public affairs".
When she saw it on stage, she changed her mind, noting, "the play has come at the best possible occasion: it relieves the terrible tension that we all feel about foreign affairs by laughing at every one concerned.
"[6] Homer Woodbridge says that "As a dramatized pamphlet or tract, the piece points in too many directions to be effective", but the caricature of Mussolini is witty and convincing.
In the final version Battler says he was only trying to remove foreigners from his country, comparing his plans to the White Australia policy that was accepted in the British empire.