Heartbreak House

The seven stars of Heartbreak House seem to be wandering aimlessly in a wilderness of script. Harold Clurman, for all his renown as director, critic, and general wise man of the theatre, seems to have no idea of what to do with Bernard Shaw's disturbing, strange drama.

This is the play where the old patriarch Captain Shotover suddenly begins "weirdly chanting,"

I builded a house for my daughters, and opened the doors thereof,

That men might come for their choosing, and their betters spring from their love. . .

and a moment later, when asked if he wanted the lights turned up as he worked to invent a new war weapon, speaks the great curtain line for the first act: "No. Give me deeper darkness. Money is not made in the light."

The script calls for dusk at this point, and Ben Edwards provides splendidly perceptible and atmospheric gloom to emphasize the foreboding mood. But the almost surreal quality of this passage, its combination of mystery and sublimity that survives the most dreary Shavian bathos when read with half an ear and half a soul, is turned by its current interpreters into a distracted pandering for tepid chuckles. Mr. Clurman has caused the weird chant to be accompanied by a jolly jig, and Maurice Evans delivers Shotover's curtain line with a phlegmy ingratiation that completely drains it of grandeur.

Shotover is a crazy old man of eighty-eight, drunken and self-confessedly futile, yet hedged about, like one of Yeats' Lear-like old men, with an almost sinister magnificence. His crews believe that "he sold himself to the devil in Zanzibar, and can divine water, spot gold, explode a cartridge in your pocket with a glance of his eye, and see the truth hidden in the heart of men." Made up with a white beard in a wretchedly unsuccessful attempt to look like G.B.S., "Mr. Evans' Captain," as A. E. Watts acutely notices in the Traveler, "is a cute old rascal who encourages some people in thinking he is whoopsy."

Shotover's son-in-law Hector is another of Shaw's Chinese-puzzle characters, whose identity opens up like a box to reveal a new one underneath, leaving him a paradox that is never resolved. One of his personae is that of the romantic hero, with a moustache "like a bronze candlestick" and a general air of being a cross between the Prisoner of Zenda and Henry V. Hector is also a boaster and a liar and his wife's lapdog, but he is so totally footling and gormless in Dennis Price's portrayal that his cries of agony go off like damp firecrackers.

There are some better performances among the seven stars. As Shotover's indescribable daughter Hesione, Diana Wynward is splendid, and Pamela Brown is at least intriguing as her sister Ariadne, Lady Utterword. (They are not the "demon women" Hector describes, but that is Shaw's fault more than theirs.) Ellie Dunn, who begins as a romantic ingenue and becomes one of the quietly scary, hard-as-nails young women only Shaw could create, is played well enough by Diane Cilento.

But the woeful misconception of Shotover and Hector throws the play irretrievably out of focus, converting it into an unsuccessful attempt at mild country-house comedy. Alan Webb, Sorrell Booke, and Patrick Horgan are excellent in roles that can be played like refugees from Noel Coward; but Shaw had incomparably greater things in mind.

Heartbreak House has no plot, and its wit flashes, as its farce pops, only intermittently. Shaw's characters are too idiosyncratic for Heartbreak House to be, as he intended it, "cultured, leisured England before the war." But the form of Checkhov and the style and content of Shaw combine in a haunting semi-darkness that retains its excitement when the hard bright light of ordinary Shaw tires the mind's eye. Its primary quality is this atmosphere, which requires exactly the sort of orchestration of every element that Mr. Clurman has notably failed to provide.