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by George Bernard Shaw, directed by Tim Carroll

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

July 10–October 3, 2026

Captain Shotover: “Stand by, all hands, for judgment”

Heartbreak House is one of Shaw’s greatest plays. The Shaw Festival has proven this over the previous productions I have seen there in 1978, 1985, 1999 and 2011. Now comes a Heartbreak House directed by Tim Carroll that makes the play pure tedium. In his eleven seasons as the Festival’s Artistic Director, this is only the third play by Shaw he has deigned to direct. His lack of enthusiasm for the Festival’s namesake playwright is so evident one wonders how he was ever chosen to be its Artistic Director. What Carroll’s Heartbreak House gives us is one of Shaw’s deepest and most reflective plays presented with a minimum of insight, intellectual or dramatic.

I related the story of the play in my review Christopher Newton’s production in 2011: “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”.

I also noted how Newton made the structure of the play so clear: “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”.

The problem with Carroll’s production is that while we may understand the basic plot, Carroll does nothing whatsoever to highlight the parallels and contrasts among the characters. In fact, it seems, that Carroll is deliberately attempting to make the play’s structure and hence its meaning as obscure as possible.

This is evident when we first see Ximena Pinilla’s set upon entering the theatre. All four of the Shaw’s previous productions have seen the designers attempt to create Shaw’s fantastic idea on stage of a house that looks like a ship. This point is essential to the play’s symbolism where the presiding genius is Captain Shotover and where there is frequent discussion of what causes a shipwreck. The house-as-ship is a symbol of England as is obvious in Hector’s questions to Shotover, “And this ship that we are all in? This soul's prison we call England?” to which Shotover replies, “She will strike and sink and split. Do you think the laws of God will be suspended in favor of England because you were born in it?”

Pinilla’s set evokes no maritime symbolism. In this arena staging she gives us a wooden floor painted with a diamond pattern, a random array of chairs with two chairs suspended for unknown reasons over the floor. The floor looks neither like the deck of a ship nor like floor of a country house. Especially odd is that Carroll does have the performers periodically rearrange the chairs but never in any discernible pattern. Further, Carroll has characters sit in these chairs no matter which way they are facing to hold their conversations. It is impossible to establish any links among the characters when they so often speak without even facing each other.

Rather than attempting to draw us into the play, Carroll uses alienation devices to distance us from the action. The play already has a cast of ten, but Carroll adds two characters not in Shaw’s text — a Butler and a Maid, who speak snippets of Shaw’s stage directions. At first this technique appears useful when the two in alternation tell us who all the characters are when they enter and where we are with each change of scene. Other than that, when the two describe actions we can already see on stage, their use becomes annoying.

Worst of all, Carroll uses the two to speak stage directions as a substitute to what the directions describe. Therefore, at the end, when one announces “A dull distant explosion is heard” we heard some of Claudio Vena’s unsuitably comic tinkly music and no explosion at all. The same happens when one states calmly, “Another and louder explosion is heard”.

Audience members who did not already know the play will have no idea what is occurring even though these explosions at the conclusion are vital to understanding the meaning of the play and the meaning of where this house-as-ship-as-England has been heading for from the very beginning. We thus cannot gauge how perverse Hesione’s world view is when, referring to the (silent) explosions she exclaims, “[W]hat a glorious experience! I hope they'll come again tomorrow night”. What really is perverse is Carroll’s deliberate obscuring of the play’s conclusion.

Carroll’s failure to elucidate the play’s structure and symbolism contribute to our experience of tedium. His failure to give the action any momentum exacerbates the situation. But what knocks any residual excitement from the show is Carroll’s failure to give the performers any direction. With a few exceptions the actors present their characters in a certain manner when we first meet them but then do not change from that point on even when the plot demands it.

The most significant example of this are the play’s two central characters, Ellie Dunn and Captain Shotover. Allison Edwards-Crewe begins her Ellie well. She gives us an innocent young woman who is baffled by the devil-may-care attitude of so many denizens of Shotover’s house. Edwards-Crewe does show that Ellie is shattered by the revelation that the man she fell in love with is her best friend’s husband. But the steps by which Ellie overcomes her heartbreak, decides not to marry Mangan, her fiancé, and then decides to marry the ancient Shotover of all people is left completely unclear. These are steps Carroll should have helped Edwards-Crewe emphasize, but after Ellie experiences her heartbreak, Carroll rather cruelly leaves her to fend for herself.

Shotover’s attitude should also change. How else can he develop from a confirmed misanthrope and doomsayer to a man who is willing to marry. Carroll allows Tom Rooney to give a very odd performance in which Shotover rushes in to say a few perfunctory lines and then rushes out. Rooney must that think this abrupt manner which often carries insults for the whomever he encounters is enough to demonstrate how peculiar Shotover is. Yet, Rooney has to alter Shotover’s brusqueness and rudeness somehow or his desire to marry Ellie will seem absurd. Since Rooney never does alter Shotover’s manner, the whole idea of his marriage seems to come out of nowhere.

The play, in fact, suggests that people who are unable to change are one of the many reasons that England will be so unprepared for war. The three most flirtatious characters — Hesione, Ariadne and Hector — do not, in Shaw’s text, change at all from the play’s beginning to its end. In the play general flippancy is seen as a flaw. Julia Coirse, Sochi Fried and Martin Happer who play these three accordingly do not change their manner during the action. The problem is that the three also do not vary the manner or intonation of their line delivery which makes listening to them literally monotonous.

Luckily, some of the actors have decided to make their characters feel more substantial. The foremost of these is Graeme Somerville as Boss Mangan. Somerville makes Mangan who should count as the most reprehensible of the characters into one of the play’s most human figure. Somerville makes clear that Mangan’s realization that Ellie does not really love him shows Magnan as more perceptive than anyone had previously thought. Somerville carefully traces Mangan’s descent from seeming one of the most formidable characters to one so utterly crushed that he confesses to all his misdeeds.

Among the others, Neil Barclay as Mazzini, Ellie’s father, Fiona Byrne as Nurse Guinness and Sanjay Talwar as the Burglar all do their best to make their characters feel like real, multifaceted people. In contrast, Carroll seems to want his two added characters — Michael Therriault as the Butler and Kristi Frank as the Maid — to act as much like automatons as possible.

Given that the Shaw Festival under Carroll’s regime has noticeably reduced how many plays by Shaw it stages, it is especially sad that Heartbreak House, the only Shaw on the season’s schedule, should be so disappointing. It is also discouraging that for the first time since the Festival theatre was built the Festival has not seen fit to stage the play in the Festival’s largest venue, but rather in the Studio Theatre which was, before the Royal George was demolished, the Festival’s smallest venue suitable for the more specialized of the Festival’s offerings.

One wonders what has happened to make one of the greatest plays by the Festival’s namesake playwright suitable now for only so small a venue. It seems like a precarious move for a Festival that it now does not even mention Bernard Shaw in its mission statement except in the name of the festival.* The Shaw used to stage Heartbreak House about every ten years. We will have to hope that in about ten years, if the Shaw Festival is even staging Shaw anymore, that we will get a Heartbreak House as insightful and exciting as those we have seen in the past.

Christopher Hoile

*The Shaw Festival’s 2026 Mission Statement reads: “One of the largest charitable theatre companies in North America, the Shaw Festival’s mission is to enrich and connect people’s lives through theatre”.

In 2025 the Statement read: “Inspired by the spirit of Bernard Shaw, the Shaw Festival creates unforgettable theatrical encounters”.

Photos: Tom Rooney as Captain Shotover, Graeme Somerville (standing) as Boss Mangan, Allison Edwards-Crewe as Ellie Dunn and Sochi Fried as Adriadne Utterword; Sochi Fried as Adriadne Utterword and Martin Happer as Hector Hushabye; Julia Course as Hesione Hushabye, Graeme Somerville as Boss Mangan and Neil Barclay as Mazzini; Kristi Frank as the Maid, Tom Rooney as Captain Shotover and Fiona Byrne as Nurse Guinness; Sochi Fried as Adriadne Utterword, Martin Happer as Hector Hushabye, Tom Rooney as Captain Shotover, Neil Barclay as Mazzini, Julia Course as Hesione Hushabye, Graeme Somerville as Boss Mangan and Jason Cadieux as Randall Utterword. © 2026 David Cooper.

For tickets visit: www.shawfest.com.