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by George Bernard Shaw, directed by Christopher Newton

Shaw Festival, Festival Theatre, Niagara-on-the-Lake

May 25-October 7, 2011

Heartbreak House is one of Shaw’s greatest but most elusive plays.  It’s received five previous productions at the Shaw Festival, the most recent directed by Tadeusz Bradecki in 1999.  Bradecki presented the play as the tragedy of the British upper classes wasting their lives in personal intrigues and posturing and unable to understand the world outside of them heading for collapse in World War I.  This time former Shaw Festival Artistic Director Christopher Newton presents the play as a comedy emphasizing the abundant humour of the play and at the same time making its structure clearer than ever.  If you have never thought of Heartbreak House as a comedy before, Newton’s production will be a real eye-opener.

Shaw gave Heartbreak House the subtitle “A Fantasia in the Russian Manner on English Themes” and his Preface specifically mentions Chekhov as the Russian in question.  It is likely this subtitle that has given the play the reputation of being gloomy and abstruse.  As people have finally realized, Chekhov himself thought of his plays as comedies, even those we commonly treat as tragedies.  The one play by Chekhov that Shaw mentions in his Preface is The Cherry Orchard, in which an aristocratic family loses its symbolic orchard by refusing ever to face the realities necessary to save it.  The setting for the first act of Chekhov’s play is the family nursery suggesting that though its earlier inhabitants have gained in years they have not really gained in wisdom.  In Heartbreak House, the nurse of Captain Shotover’s children is still in service and her presence suggests the same about the characters of Shaw’s play.  In The Cherry Orchard the one practical character, Lopakhin, triumphs in business if not in love.  In Heartbreak House, Shaw goes even further since his one practical character, Boss Mangan, not only triumphs in neither but gets blown up at the end.  This should signal to us that the play is less a tragedy than a very dark comedy.

The plot of Heartbreak House is very simple.  Hesione Hushabye, daughter of the eccentric Captain Shotover, invites her friend Ellie Dunn to spend the weekend with her at her father’s country house.  She also invites Ellie’s would-be fiancé, the businessman Boss Mangan, with hopes of breaking off the relationship between the two.  Ellie confirms Hesione’s suspicions that she does not love Mangan, but when Hesione asks whom she does love, the man turns out to be Hesione’s husband Hector, who wooed Ellie under a false name.  He even claimed he was found in a wooden casket, likely a direct reference to The Importance of Being Earnest.  Her heart broken, Ellie decides that she will marry Mangan after all since that is the only way the world allows women to gain financial security.  This decision throws the house into an uproar.

If Newton portrays the play’s love intrigues as comic, he also makes their relations to each other admirably clear.  Hesione, Hector and Hesione’s sister Ariadne are incorrigible flirts.  The first heart to break is Ellie’s when she realizes who her wooer is.  The second is Randall Utterword, Ariadne’s brother-in-law, who has been pursuing her around the world.  The third is Boss Mangan when Hesione reveals she was just luring him away from Ellie.  Newton makes the parallels between the two heartbroken men clear by having both roll into fetal position and bawl when they realize the hopelessness of their desires.  All three of the heartbroken have fallen in love with unobtainable objects--unconsciously in the case of Ellie, consciously in the case of Randall and Mangan.  The question, of course, is why people torture themselves over what they cannot have instead of choosing realistic goals.  When Ellie does just that, the romanticists of the play are outraged.  Though his pacing is perhaps too slow, Newton’s presentation of the action is so illuminating, it’s hard to think why the plot of Heartbreak House ever seemed so complicated. 

Captain Shotover’s house has a realistic dimension but it is stronger as a symbol.  It is a place like Prospero’s island in The Tempest or like the forests of As You Like It or A Midsummer Night’s Dream, where the illusions people have about themselves and each other stripped away.  However, whereas in Shakespeare the visitors are purged and ready to re-enter the real world, in Shaw the visitors are purged of all that kept them going and leave them unable to deal with the world outside.  In the last words of the play when Hesione and Ellie hope for the return of the bombers that missed the house on their first air raid, we have to wonder how conscious they are that their longing for real excitement after so many petty love intrigues also entails a longing for death.  Shaw seems to suggest that only a confrontation with death will shock the house guests into an appreciation of life. 

Designer Leslie Frankish has admirably captured the symbolic aspects of the house.  In a library, the packed shelves covered with sail-like sheets, rise the ribs and bottom of a boat reached by gang-planks on either side.  Dominating the room is a huge astronomical clock.  The notion of the house as a ship and the play as a fantasy become more obvious in the ingenious transformation of the set in Act 3 aided by Kevin Lamotte exquisite lighting.  It’s rather as if Shotover as Noah had abandoned his plans to save mankind and now, as he says, focusses on how best to destroy it.  The house also represents England and as Shotover points out, it has no navigator.    Above the library shelves the motto is emblazoned: “Voyaging through strange seas of thought--alone”--a quotation from Wordsworth’s The Prelude, Book 3, where the poet describes the mind of Isaac Newton.  With that reference Christopher Newton suggests that England’s voyage through the dangerous waters of the future may destroy all that was traditional and familiar, but sadly necessary if the country is ever to wake up to reality.

The cast is flawless.  Douglas Rain, great as he is, played Shotover the last two times at the Shaw.  He emphasized the character’s eccentricity and misanthropy to the point that the ending seemed hard to believe.  Michael Ball, however, shows that Shotover’s peculiarity is a pose like those of all the other characters, hiding the immediate warmth he feels for certain people like Ellie.  Emphasizing that he too has a façade that will later be dropped integrates him with the rest of the cast and finally helps the ending make sense.  Unlike some previous Ellies, Robin Evan Willis does not play the character as a complete innocent.  This quality gave Bradecki’s 1999 production the feeling of Alice in Wonderland, where Alice/Ellie waves goodbye to the doomed wonderland floating away in the production’s striking final image.  Here, however, Willis portrays Ellie as a complex young woman who bides her time, although her frustration grows, as she waits for Hesione and her guests to start treating her sensibly. 

Deborah Hay and Laurie Paton are marvellous at showing how Hesione and Ariadne, though quite different, both take after their father.  Both seem to have cultivated self-contradiction and a selective memory for their own purposes--Hesione to smooth social interaction, Ariadne to annoy people and assert her own importance.  Beneath their superficial foolishness we sense a deep happiness in Hesione as much as a deep unhappiness in Ariadne that makes both characters more sympathetic than usual.  Benedict Campbell does not play Boss Mangan as a villain but rather as a blusterer.  That fact alone suggests his pose as an unscrupulous captain of industry is also a façade and prepares us for his unmasking later in the play.  Blair Williams and Patrick Galligan give excellent performances as a duo of useless males--Hector Hushabye and Randall Utterword--the first who creates the persona of a dashing adventurer to compensate for is boring domestic life, the second who wastes his life in pursuit of unrequited love.  Patrick McManus is almost unrecognizable as Ellie’s father, Mazzini Dunn, who at first appears to be comic milquetoast but whose seeming weakness hides a hidden power.  William Vickers makes a welcome return as the burglar William Dunn, who has devised a way to make being caught pay more handsomely than burgling itself.  And Patricia Hamilton is very funny as Nurse Guinness, who has been in the house so long that none of the bizarre goings-on can surprise her.

In his Director’s Notes, Christopher Newton calls Heartbreak House “one of the greatest plays in our language”.  After his tenure as Artistic Director of the Shaw Festival from 1980 to 2002, Newton has become the most experienced director of Shaw in North America and likely in the English-speaking world.  If there is any justice, his rethinking of Shaw’s masterpiece should have a major impact on how people view the play in future.  It’s a production no theatre-lover should miss.                  

©Christopher Hoile

Note: This review is a Stage Door exclusive.

Photo: Michael Ball and Robin Evan Willis. ©2011 David Cooper.

For tickets, visit www.shawfest.com.