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The play operates on various levels. There is a through-line relating to Shakespeare and Wagner, with Ellie reading Othello, and the moonlight reminding Hesione of Tristan and Isolde. The Othello image is picked up in Hesione’s husband. However there are several other Shakespearean tragedies underlying the play. Shaw referred to Heartbreak House as his King Lear, and to the Shotover daughters as Goneril and Regan, while Ellie – who corresponds to Cordelia – is also conceived as Lady Macbeth (Letters to Lillah McCarthy, 10 August 1917, and to St John Ervine, 23 October 1921). Similarly the weaving together of recurrent motifs in the dialogue, as well as (in a different sense) the ending are Wagnerian, while Shaw described the pre-war sleep-world in which the characters are trapped as “a palace of enchantment, as in the second act of Parsifal” (Letter to J.C. Squire, 14 October 1919). However, the play is also essentially realistic, as even details like the age of various characters indicate.
The youngest male in the play “has an engaging air of being young and unmarried, but on close inspection is found to be at least over forty” as the stage directions specify. Although most of the action takes place before the war, the ending is designed to bring an audience face to face with the grim actualities of 1917 (the date Shaw completed the play) when all the men in their twenties and thirties were absent – either away at the Front, or increasingly missing in action, and dead. This also included the actors, since those who might have played younger parts were in uniform too; and as Shaw commented, “The hero is 88, and all the other men 50 or more, which of course suits the war conditions” (Letter to Lillah McCarthy, 10 August 1917). In addition, Shaw’s explanation of the play to his Swedish translator, Hugo Valentin, emphasizes that the characters have real-life analogues and their social context is intended as an accurate depiction of actual conditions.
6.4.2 Bernard Shaw, Letter to Hugo Valentin, 27 October 1917
10 Adelphi Terrace WG2
27th October 1917
… I am still perplexed about Heartbreak House. It is a horrible symptom of old age in me that I am beginning to write quantities of stuff without being able to make up my mind to regard them as finished and publish them. […] You say you do not understand it; but there is nothing to understand beneath the surface: it is a picture of a certain sort of life that our civilization tends to produce among people of exceptional vitality and sensibility, with such visitors as Lord Devonport (Mangan), the Foreign Office toff, the man who is poor because he is honest and has no push, meaning no greed or vulgar ambition, and the burglar who uses our obsolete and savage criminal system as an instrument of blackmail. The only part of society which is not a quicksand is the life of the equestrian country house class and the frankly autocratic Crown-Colony-Governing-Class extolled by the daughter of the house who happens to be born conventional. The old Captain is your prophet Jeremiah bawling the judgment of God on all this insanity. And you have the undercurrent of sex continually reproducing quicksand as fast as the welter tries to consolidate itself. That is the best account I can give you of it. I think what makes it puzzling is that the people seem to be so interesting and attractive and novel at first sight that one is led to expect great things from them; and when they are all reduced to absurdity, and even the solution of blowing them to bits misses fire, the spectator feels baffled and disappointed, as if something very promising had been wantonly spoilt.
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Heartbreak House: chronology of major early performances
November 1920 The New York Theatre Ellie Dunn: Elizabeth Risdon
New York Guild Captain Shotover: Albert
Garrick Theatre Perry
Producer: Dudley Digges Hesione Hushabye: Effie
Designer: Lee Simsonson Shannon
Boss Mangan: Dudley Digges
October 1921 The Court Theatre Ellie Dunn: Ellen O’Malley
London Producers: Bernard Shaw Captain Shotover: Brember
and James B. Fagan Wills
Designers: James B. Fagan Lady Utterwood: Edith Evans
Hesione Hushabye: Mary
Grey
Boss Mangan: Alfred Clark
April 1932 Queen’s Theatre Ellie Dunn: Eileen Beldon
London Producer: H.K. Ayliff Captain Shotover: Cedric
Designer: Paul Shelving Hardwicke
Lady Utterwood: Edith Evans
Hesione Hushabye: Margaret
Chatwin
Boss Mangan: Wilfrid Lawson
March 1937 Westminster Theatre Ellie Dunn: Margaret Hood
London Producer: Michael Captain Shotover: Cecil
MacOwan Trouncer
Lady Utterwood: Agnes
Lauchlan
Hesione Hushabye: Mary
Grey
Boss Mangan: Mark Dignam
April 1938 The Mercury Theatre Ellie Dunn: Geraldine
New York Director: Orson Welles Fitzgerald
Designer: John Koenig Captain Shotover: Orson
Welles
Lady Utterword: Phyllis Joyce
Hesione Hushabye: Mady
Christians
Boss Mangan: George
Coulouris
Performance and reception
Lillah McCarthy, Granville Barker’s wife who had acted leading roles in several of Shaw’s plays including Man and Superman and The Doctor’s Dilemma, had approached Shaw for permission to stage Heartbreak House in 1917. However, Shaw refused to have the play performed during the war; and the negative reaction to the text, published in 1919, continued his reluctance to allow a production. Ironically, the criticism was very much the same as the English reaction had been to The Cherry Orchard, which dismissed Chekhov’s characters as incredible in an English context. Despite Shaw’s insistence on the English focus in the subtide – “A Fantasia in the Russian Manner upon English Themes” – J.C. Squire’s comment was typical:
his recent plays should be classified as ‘Dramas of My Dotage.’ A worse volume than his new collection (Heartbreak House, Great Catherine, and Play-lets of the War, Constable, 6s. net) has never appeared under the name of a man of reputation … The characters in [Heartbreak House] are the most extraordinary collection of figments that ever failed to be produced on an English stage … It is no use Mr. Shaw saying that he meant to show them as to the last degree grotesque, for they represent nobody and satirize nobody. Until Mr. Shaw invented them such people – or such simulacra – never existed on this earth, unless Shaw has found them in some monstrous half-world of inhuman cranks to which he alone has access … Had the play a vestige of reality it would be very nasty.
(Land and Water, 9 October 1919)
The reason for such vehemence was the perception that Shaw was indulging in “unseemly jeers” against “the dead or the bereaved” – and Shaw replied to this review, asserting “you think the war is over; but the sense of proportion has not yet been regained. Shame, guilt disillusion have upset it even more” (Letter to J.C. Squire, 14 October 1919). Because none of the connections (Bloomsbury, or Lord Devonport) were recognized, even when the critics saw some of the qualities in the play, these were misunderstood. For instance, several critics followed J. Middle ton Murry – a strong supporter of Shaw’s earlier work – who commented “all the characters seem to be scurrying around like lunatics” but drew the conclusion that this made the play itself ludicrous, a “fantastic farce”. The parallel to Chekhov also created misunderstanding, as is clear from Murry’s review:
Mr. Shaw … says that ‘“Heartbreak House” is not merely the name of the play … it is cultured, leisured Europe before the war.’ All that we can reply is that we do not recognize it …
The comparison with ‘The Cherry Orchard,’ of which Mr. Shaw deliberately reminds us on the first page of his preface, could not possibly be escaped. It would in any case have leapt to the eye … There is not, as the mathematical logicians would say, a one-to-one corresponde
nce between the futility of the Russian intelligentsia and our own; therefore a formula by which the one is completely expressed cannot be used to express the other. The corresponding object has to be seen and studied for itself. Instead of this we suspect that Mr. Shaw has projected the Russian formula on to English society. The result is chaos and pandemonium.
(The Atheneum, 17 October 1919)
As a result of such criticism, Shaw discouraged producers – such as Esmé Percy, who had staged the first complete version of Man and Superman – from performing Heartbreak House.
The first production took place in America, staged by the Theatre Guild in 1920. Even from across the Atlantic, Shaw exercised considerable control over the way the play was performed. The contract, drawn up by Shaw, specified that
[t]he Manager shall not in any performance of the said play… wilfully make or allow any alterations transpositions interpolations or omissions in or from the text … nor shall the Manager wilfully do or allow the performers to do anything that would have the effect of misrepresenting the Author’s meaning either for better or for worse.
When the director (Emmanuel Reichler, the former managing director of the Berlin Volksbühne) requested cuts, Shaw threatened to cancel the contract, and asserted “the alternative to attracting audiences by pleasing them for two hours is to put the utmost strain on their serious attention for three, and sending them home exhausted but indelibly impressed” (Letter to Theresa Helburn, 21 October 1920). Reichler was replaced by Dudley Digges, who also played Mangan, and the script was performed in full. Shaw also sent sketches, stage plans and specifications for the scenery – which formed the basis for the setting designed by Lee Simonson, a founding member of the Theatre Guild who went on to design over half their productions and promote a style of simplified realism. His letter to Simonson provides a very exact visualization for both the physical setting and mood of Heartbreak House.
Further productions followed over the next year – in Vienna, followed by Sweden and England – and Shaw’s correspondence, dealing particularly with the casting of the female roles, gives essential insights into the characters, and the balance between them. His letter to Tor Hedberg, the managing director of Kungliga Dramatiska Theatern in Stockholm, (though actually addressing his brother Karl Hedberg, who was staging the play) also helps to define the mood of the play. When Nigel Playfair – who had taken over the Lyric Theatre, where he was shortly to establish a brilliant reputation with a highly influential revival of John Gay’s eighteenth-century Beggar’s Opera – disagreed with Shaw’s suggestion for casting Ellie, he withdrew the play. As he commented, Playfair “had made up his mind that Ellie must be a sweet little sexual attraction and that Hesione (Mrs. Hushabye) was the heavy part” (Letter to St. John Ervine, 23 October 1921).
Heartbreak House was taken over by James Fagan (whose wife played Hesione), with Shaw himself directing. His choice for Ellie was an Irish actress, Ellen O’Malley, whom he already had in mind for the part having seen her “playing Shakespeare with Barker at the Court” (As You Like It in 1904) as he explained to Arnold Bennett: “I gave her Ellie … because Ellie is technically the heavy lead in the play, just as I should give her Lady Macbeth” (20 October 1921). Shaw’s reference to stock nineteenth-century acting roles – the “heavy”, the “ingenue” – is a way of underlining that the character of Ellie does not correspond to a type; and his response to a reviewer who found Ellen O’Malley’s Irish accent misplaced, provides further detail on the pivotal significance of her part:
Why the devil should Ellie Dunn seem in her element in Heartbreak House? I took the greatest care that she should not be – that she should be in the sharpest contrast to all the heartbreakers, and when she is lured into it she should walk over Hector and Hesione straight to the Captain, the positive efficient man on whose shoulders the whole structure is carried. The contrast is forced almost to discordance by having Ellie played by an Irish actress … I can only say that Ellen O’Malley presents Ellie Dunn precisely as I planned her: the strong respectable woman of the play, virginal by contrast with the demon daughters, and yet audaciously passionate and imaginative.
(Letter to St. John Erwine, 28 October 1921)
Figure 6.4 Ellie Dunn and Captain Shotover, Act I, New York 1920
Figure 6.5 Waiting for the bombs in Act III, London 1921
There were problems with the production, partly due to a shortness of rehearsal time, which led to difficulties with pacing, as well as to technical delays (which were particularly obvious on the first night) due to faulty stage machinery. Shaw even suggested cuts to Fagan, and the actors were encouraged to speed up the delivery of their speeches. His letter to Ellen O’Malley (addressed to “Ellie-Ellen”) focusses on this – but it also indicates the way her character is intended to develop and the type of balance Shaw considered necessary for the play’s performance.
6.4.3 Bernard Shaw, Letter to Lee Simonson, 23 August 1920
To Lee Simonson
Parknasilla, Kenmare. Cork
23rd August
The XVII century Dutch marine pictures shew us lovely windows in brown woodwork with magnificent gilt framing, tall, handsome, with a balcony or stern gallery, gold in the framing, gold in the water, gold in the brown paint. They are set like this mostly except that they stand much higher above the water line, and are very ornamental. Now I know no picture which shews what they are like from the inside; so I have (or rather you have) to imagine what Captain Whatshisname would have imagined about them when he designed his house. As the captain is 150 years old or thereabouts his notions of naval architecture would not be more modern than those of the Flying Dutchman. Unfortunately I cannot draw; so I cannot help you out with a sketch; but I enclose a plan of the stage, and a rough view. The perspective and construction are impossible; but you can adapt them to 3-dimensional space. The mountains are like slate crags instead of Sussex hills; but that is what the inside of my envelopes gives me.
The difficulty of the arc light has bothered me all along. Here we use for street lighting (or used to) a white globe; and my first notion was to make it a very soft moon throwing a circle of light on the stage, so that the characters could, as directed, disappear into the surrounding darkness and emerge into the radiance. But, as you say, if you put even a candle in a dark scene the audience can see nothing else. I think you will have to shade the light (it need not be an arc) – drape it ornamentally or put a prosaic green tin to conceal the actual glare (there must be something that can be visibly extinguished) and do the real lighting off the stage.
The observatory is a cupola. The top of the dome sticks up behind the first profile, and helps to suggest the ravine supposed to be between it and the back cloth.
The flagstaff is only an excuse for something characteristic to attach the cable which feeds the arc light. All these things are suggestions and makeshifts. So long as you do not alter or mask the positions of my people on the stage, or cut out an essential effect like the cutting off of the light and leaving the group in the dark, you may do your job in your own way. The more of your own you put in, the richer the play will be. You know, I take it, that comedy dialogue is impossible unless the faces of the speakers are seen quite distincdy. That is all you have to look out for as far as the author is concerned. For the rest, let yourself rip. Artist and author are co-equal and co-eternal – see the Athanasian creed.
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PS Thanks for the pictures. They are VERY reassuring.
6.4.4 Bernard Shaw, Letter to Tor Hedberg, 27 September 1921
Miss Ebba Bystrom tells me that you are in some doubt as to how to handle Heartbreak House, and, in particular, that you want me to change the title.
I am quite aware that the play is a very puzzling one. In America a noted German producer who was engaged to direct the rehearsals said that nothing could make it presentable but drastic cutting. I immediately withdrew it. The managers thereupon dismissed the producer and pledged themselves to perform the pla
y word for word exactly as it was written, whatever the consequences might be. The result was that it ran in New York for about 125 performances, drawing roughly Kr 3625 at each performance.
In Vienna the play was produced at the Burgtheater. It was not cut: but my instructions were disregarded; the atmosphere of the piece was missed; the sexually attractive parts were given to elderly actresses without charm and the virginal heroine given to the siren of the company. Result: the play was dropped after five performances.
A Sourcebook on Naturalist Theatre Page 34