THE BASICS: HEARTBREAK HOUSE, the only play by Bernard Shaw at Shawfest this season, directed by Tim Carroll, has 12 more performances through October 3 at the Jackie Maxwell Studio Theatre, 10 Queen’s Parade, Niagara-on-the-Lake, Ontario, L0S 1J0, Canada 1-800-511-SHAW, shawfest.com
RUNTIME: 2 hours 30 minutes including one intermission (Note: the first half is long, combining Shaw’s original Acts 1 & II) (age 12+)
THUMBNAIL SKETCH: HEARTBREAK HOUSE takes place in the eccentric, ship-shaped home of Captain Shotover, an elderly former sea captain given to cryptic wisdom. Over one long evening in the early 20th century, illusions about love, money, and respectability fall away through witty, but often savage conversation. These are not nice people before us, as Shaw exposes the moral decay of England’s leisured class on the eve of catastrophe (in this case WWI but it could be any impending crisis). The play closes with an air raid, and as bombs fall, this idle self-absorbed group enjoys the light show and hopes that more bombs fall the following night.
THE PLAYERS, THE PLAY, THE PRODUCTION: Fans of the TV series “Downton Abbey” will feel right at home with this play, as we watch the idle rich play musical chairs (if not actually musical beds) with each other’s love interests. Fans of Chekhov, particularly THE CHERRY ORCHARD (last seen at Shawfest in 2019) will also recognize a cultured, idle household in a country house on the edge of ruin, letting the characters talk, flirt, and philosophize while the world outside moves toward catastrophe without them.
In fact, Shaw himself subtitled the play: “Heartbreak House: A Fantasia in the Russian Manner on English Themes” and in his preface writes that he had THE CHERRY ORCHARD in mind as a model. In Chekhov the threat is the loss of the family orchard and the old order it represents. In Shaw the air raid and the bombs exploding stand in for the war that Europe’s leisured class failed to see coming. It’s a bit sadder than the snappy witty plays such as MAJOR BARBARA. And it shows how the Victorian/Edwardian self-assured confidence we’ve seen in Oscar Wilde’s plays is about to come a cropper.
I was also reminded of seeing the musical THE GREAT GATSBY on Broadway last year (by the way, coming to Shea’s Buffalo November 10–15 this fall). I had a romanticized memory of the source novel, but watching the musical made me realize that, as in HEARTBREAK HOUSE, the characters are not nice people. Every age and generation has a zeitgeist, and the similarities are there for Anton Chekhov’s THE CHERRY ORCHARD published in 1904; George Bernard Shaw’s HEARTBREAK HOUSE, published in 1919; and F. Scott Fitzgerald’s “The Great Gatsby” published in 1925. All three works dramatize societies on the brink of collapse, but each diagnoses the crisis differently: Chekhov mourns the passing of an old world, Shaw satirizes a class too frivolous to prevent disaster, and Fitzgerald exposes the glittering rot beneath American aspiration. But all three share a fascination with illusion and how people construct identities, stories, and fantasies to avoid uncomfortable truths. Having said that, are these themes only of historical interest? Director Tim Carroll has an answer.
In his Director’s Note Tim Carroll writes: “… can one find any play of Bernard Shaw which doesn’t feel like it was written this morning? And the answer is ‘No.’ Whichever play one chooses, the audience will come out saying ‘How did he [Shaw] know that we would be living through exactly this?’”
A great advantage of visiting the Shaw Festival is that, just as with a trip to Broadway in New York, or The Stratford Festival, even “difficult” plays are so well presented that it’s a joy to see them unfold. The simple set (think of a subtle chessboard pattern) and the stunning costumes are the work of Ximena Pinilla, with lighting designed by Louise Guinand that helps guide the action, and, in the spirit of chess pieces, or dancing obliviously towards the edge of the world, or, as mentioned earlier, musical chairs (or “rearranging the deck chairs on the Titanic”), movement (critical on the smaller Jackie Maxwell stage) was directed by Alexis Milligan. Well done.
When you’re the overall Artistic Director of the Shaw Festival (as Tim Carroll has been since 2017) and you’re directing a play, you get the all-star cast, names which should resonate with any long-time Shaw visitor as “A-List.”
Here Tom Rooney plays Captain Shotover whose daughter Hesione Hushabye (Julia Course) has invited young Ellie Dunn (Allison Edwards-Crewe) to stay, with Ellie’s stiff businessman fiancé, Boss Mangan, (Graeme Somerville) and Hesione’s slippery husband, Hector (Martin Happer), both men with a “wandering eye.” And there’s an assortment of restless guests, played by Neil Barclay, Jason Cadieux, Sochi Fried, along with Sanjay Talwar as a make-believe burglar (actually just a con-man at the house to get money). The domestic “help” is played by Fiona Byrne, Kristi Frank, and Michael Therriault. At Shawfest, where plays are in repertory, actors always appear in two plays, and many of the actors above are either in AMADEUS or ONE FOR THE POT (both on stage in the Festival Theatre).
A final note: I have a special place in my heart for the Jackie Maxwell Studio theatre (located across the patio from the larger Festival Theatre) which is a “theater in the round” (actually more of a rectangle) with, as far as my experience goes, no bad seats. I’ve sat in seats on all four sides and in the four corners as well and because the seats are so heavily raked, you get a clear view of the stage without having to look around the person in front of you. And Shawfest always puts on the most interesting plays there. I highly recommend it. Still in that space are THE WIND IN THE WILLOWS, THE OHIO STATE MURDERS, and as reviewed here, HEARTBREAK HOUSE.