Heartbreak House

Heartbreak House, Shaw carefully explains in his introduction to the play, "is cultured, leisured Europe before the war." To members of the audience who have had the bad luck to miss the explanatory preface, it could be any one of a number of things, from a perverse drawing room comedy to an analytical discussion of illusion and reality. For, unlike Shaw's earlier work, Heartbreak House is not a well-made, coherent play. With a gay abandon reminiscent of Chekhov, the characters wander on and off stage, chattering seeming irrelevancies (which are resolved in the final act when the allegory becomes clear), but never contributing to the development of the plot.

All in all, the Brattle players bear up pretty well under the strain. Shaw's characters, though superficial, are polished and sophisticated, and the current production is both of these. But the occupants of Heartbreak House are more than decadent drawing-room characters. Each represents a different conceptual scheme, a different response to the environment of modern England, and their ideas-constantly change as one by one they become increasingly conscious of the wretchedness of their positions. The transformation, however, are gradual, not dynamic; whether it be the fault of the actors or of the playwright, it is impossible to keep track of them all through the maze of interweaving personal relationships.

The third act clears up the reason for the diverse points of view. For though together they represent the intellectual pinnacle of 20th century culture, each view is cowardly, frustrated, or morally bankrupt, simply because each is a mere intellectualization. The inhabitants of Heartbreak House do not have the courage to go out and fight for what they believe in. They are lovely people waiting to be annihilated, and nihilism was apparently the best Shaw could wish them.

Captain Shotover, portrayed by Philip Bourneuf, is easily the most competent acting job of the performance. Made up to resemble Shaw to an almost uncanny degree, he played the caustic, detached sceptic to perfection. The senile captain is the author's caricature of himself as a bitterly disappointed old man. In sharp contrast is Mazzini Dunn, an ineffective 19th century liberal, whose mealy-mouthed idealism is fit only for the parlor. Earl Montgomery played this part with skill and with a consistency notably lacking in many of the roles. Basil Langton's direction of this difficult play was on the whole uninspired, as were the settings by Robert O'Hearn.