Heartbreak House

It is the world before World War I. There were revolutionary ideas on paper. Power and culture were in separate compartments. Civilian response to war was irrational. The death of saloon passengers, the Lusitania sinking, was deemed a greater tragedy than Gallipoli. The setting for the play is Sussex. Hesione Hushabye is one of the daughters of Captain Shotover. Lady Utterwood, Ariadne, is Mrs. Hushabye's sister. Ellie Dunn, a visitor, arrives and encounters Captain Shotover and Lady Utterwood. It is a disordered house. Sister does not recognize sister. Father does not recognize daughter. Guests are not expected, the bell doesn't work. One of the sisters is Bohemian, the other is not. Boss Mangan seeks to marry Ellie. This is a deplorable plan in Mrs. Hushabye's view. Mangan confesses to Ellie that he ruined her father in business. It turns out that Ellie is inclined to marry Mangan even if he engaged in sharp practices in regard to her father's business. Mangan doesn't really have money and other things are not waht they seem. People shouldn't be deceived by appearances. This is clever stuff.

Bernard Shaw's 1919 play, "Heartbreak House," is a bitterly angry black comedy - a satire against a British imperial culture in the first two decades of the 20th century that gave rise to the excesses of the first World War, and which could (and would) do a lot worse if given the chance. Consciously drawing on a healthy and proud tradition of Irish satirists, including Jonathan Swift and Oscar Wilde, Shaw brings us into a declining English country house, which seems to be run by no one in particular for a party of apocalyptic (in)significance. The house is home to the Shotover family, the eighty-eight year old patriarch Captain Shotover, his daughter, Hesione Hushabye, and her husband Hector. Over the course of three acts, Shaw explores the 'fascinating' qualities and inhabitants of the boat-like house, and its broader implications as a kind of ship of state.The play opens as a young woman, Ellie Dunn, arrives at the house, ostensibly the guest of Hesione. With no one to greet her, and her bags left on the front porch of the house, Ellie finds her way into the boat-like drawing room, where she meets the indefatigable Nurse Guinness, and the inscrutable Captain Shotover, who is in the midst of his latest plan to usefully dispose of the hoard of dynamite he keeps in the garden. Gradually, the party fills out as Hesione, Hector, Lady Utterword (nee Shotover), Randall Utterword (the melancholy brother-in-law), Mazzini Dunn (soldier of freedom and Ellie's father), and Boss Mangan (capitalist and Ellie's intended) arrive at this bizarre house. Hesione plans to break off Ellie's engagement to the much older Mangan, and free her to follow the course of romance, while Utterwood and Hector variously pursue their sister-in-law. Of course, Shaw does not let his characters, nor his audience, off with a simple comedy of manners.Shaw uses the play to expose the play of civilization, in which we all have a part, but with much more comic viciousness than Wilde, and with (possibly) more brute directness than Swift. The most explicit butt of Shaw's circuitous and rapid-fire dialogues is Mangan, whose gruff capitalist demeanor and pursuit of money and reputation is ultimately the guidepost of society as Shaw envisions it. As the lowest common denominator, Mangan's crudity reflects upwards at the socially climbing Ellie, the egregious nonchalance of Hesione, and the almost intentional insanity of Captain Shotover. Shaw implies that if Mangan and his ilk are running the show, then everyone who is not working to change it is complicit in its depredations. Listless bohemians, like Hesione and Hector, give the lie to their apparent graces, in an effort to maintain sanity in the midst of their perpetual confinement with each other. Lady Utterword's complaisance belies her loveless existence, and Mazzini Dunn's servility is the mark of an idealist who has given up his ideals in favor of subsistence. Is the refinement we everyday pretend to, nothing more than a

Bernard Shaw is a great playwright. In this particular play he exposes the shortcomings of English upper classes. They only think of mariage, business, politics, but England is in fact a drunken skipper, a skipper on which every sailor and even the captain are drunk with rum and unable to see the danger coming up and to deal with it. So the skipper is condemned to break on the rocks. England in the same way is condemned to break on the rocks because no one, in the upper classes, thinks beyond their interest. This catastrophe coming up is shown by some kind of supernatural explosion at the end of the play and the members of these upper classes admire the event as being beautiful and they are totally unable to cope. The picture given by Shaw of England is particularly pessimistic. Their is no future and no hope for that country. Along the way he discusses important issues such as the liberation of women within their enslavement and their power is nothing but hypnotism or drowning men in a sea of words and charm. The only sane man in the play is the captain, with an allusion to Whitman, « Captain my captain », who sees the catastrophes coming and is unable to convince his own daughters or their husbands and friends that they have to control the boat if they don't want it to capsize. But does he really want to convince them ?Dr Jacques COULARDEAU

I recently saw the production of this play in Atlanta and I was blown away. This is a fascinating, fast-paced comedy with dark undertones about a bankrupt society. It is set in the late nineteenth/early twentieth c., but the issues turn out to be very contemporary: the question of capitalism, security vs. adventure, gender roles... I recommend it!