Old Play on Broadway

Heartbreak House has always had its advocates as one of Shaw's most important plays. Certainly Shaw himself meant it to be important. A formidably long work, it had to do, Shaw announced, with "cultured, leisured Europe" before World War I: it was to be a sort of Shavian Cherry Orchard. Thus frankly symbolic, it portrays the kind of people, the ways of living and the states of mind that helped produce the 1914 war. Into the ship-shaped house of an aged English sea captain (Maurice Evans), himself the voice of a more high-mettled era, there troop, like creatures into the Ark, a ruling-class woman, a femme fatale, a shy, dashing Englishman, a footless, philandering one, an upstart capitalist, his kind, downtrodden factotum--even an unexpected burglar. At the opposite end, in the assemblage, from grizzled old Captain Shotover is bright-eyed young Ellie Dunn, standing for the future as he for the past, proving most malleable as he is most set.

What Shaw also confessed about Heartbreak House was that he wrote it just as it came to him, with no formal plan. He need hardly have said so; along with largeness of conception goes a looseness of treatment, as much sprawl as size. As Shaw's characters explain themselves and react on one another in an evening-long, often brilliant conversation piece, something veers toward tragedy, something else explodes into farce, a philosophic aria gives way to a dialectical trio, fireworks light up the scene, flummery disfigures it. Heartbreak House is quite marvelous in bits and pieces, but too miscellaneous and uneven as a whole. In the long final scene, where the immemorial charm of the English countryside is charged with the tensions of an approaching air raid, Shaw achieves for a time a kind of magic. But even here, more in the style of an old morality play than an English Cherry Orchard, it is the dawdling leisure class Shaw spares when the bombs fall, and the thief and the tycoon that he kills off.

Despite its manifold wit and moments of wisdom, the plotless Heartbreak House drifts along with its people, and at times reflects their languor. This is partly because Shaw's ante-bellum England is not in itself a theme, but only a framework for one. Where Chekhov portrayed something dramatic, the death--indeed the suicide--of a class, Shaw caught, at most, the malaise of a country. Moreover, his characters are all so busy explaining what they suffer from that though they convey a forcible sense of diagnosis, they give off only the most feeble sense of disease.

Last week's star-studded production was often brilliant, but not everywhere right. There were superb performances by Pamela Brown as Shotover's snooty upper-class daughter, by Diana Wynyard as his masterfully radiant one, by Alan Webb, despite the hurdle of being the good man of the play. But there was merely competent performing too. And the last scene lacked any touch of magic, partly because it wore too lively an air, partly because Ben Edwards' all-purpose set placed it in a well-lighted sort of courtyard instead of a dusky, dreamlike garden. All the same, after a 21-year absence from Broadway, a play boasting so many good things, in a production with such good things, is well worth a visit.

This file is automatically generated by a robot program, so reader's discretion is required.