A Sourcebook on Naturalist Theatre

by Christopher Innes (ed)

  I cannot sufficiently urge you not to attempt the play if you are not prepared to take it as it is, without the slightest modification to suit the taste of the public or the conventions of the theatre. I have not neglected these things in writing it: there is not a line that will not make its effect if it is properly delivered, and if the atmosphere which makes the play a picture of a house, an enchanted, amazing sort of house, is created. That is why the title is so important: if you take the title away and substitute the name of one of the characters, you will lose your way at once.

  The casting is extremely important. The two sisters must be the most fascinating women you can find on the stage. Ariadne must be a brilliant comedian: Hesione must be irresistible. In contrast the girl Ellie must be perfectly virginal: her spiritual marriage with the old captain must be like the marriage by which a nun is made the bride of Christ. If you get the women right you will have no trouble with the men: their parts are easy and obvious. Even the old captain’s part, though it is effective enough for a great actor, is not really difficult.

  I am rehearsing the play in London just now myself, and can therefore speak from experience as to what can be done with it. I am a practical producer, and always handle the original productions of my plays in London myself. I do not write merely as a theatre poet whose work has to be handed to a regisseur to be adapted to the stage: my plays are written for the stage, and the stage business is as much a part of the play as the dialogue. If you will take the play as it is written and go through it with the company on the stage every day for a fortnight I think you will find that it will cease to be puzzling and that even the most unpromising parts of it will prove amusing and indispensible to the effect of the whole.

  The successful American production, which ran for 125 performances over five months in 1920, established the Theatre Guild as one of New York’s leading companies. It began the Theatre Guild’s long association with Shaw, during which they staged almost all Shaw’s plays up to My Fair Lady, the musical version of Pygmalion which they also commissioned, in 1952. By contrast, the reception of Heartbreak House when it finally reached the stage in London in October 1921 was extremely negative. In addition to the faults of the production, public opinion had already been set by the printed text. Around 20,000 copies had been published on both sides of the Atlantic in 1919. In addition to miscomprehension of the play itself in the reviews of the book, outrage had been caused by the preface. Even Lena Ashwell, the actress who had told Shaw the story of her father that became the inspiration for Heartbreak House, wrote an angry article accusing Shaw of traducing those who had sacrificed their lives in battle as well as ordinary people who had aided the war effort. Shaw’s attitude to the criticisms – indicated by his reply to Lena Ashwell: “you said that I had attacked the soldiers. I did exactly the opposite: I shewed that the soldiers saved the situation while a noisy gang of civilians were disgracing us” (Letter, 31 October 1919) – was hardly designed to win public support. The two-year gap between publication and staging meant that many of the English audience would have already read and discussed the play before seeing it. Quite apart from the way the criticism of the published version might have conditioned the spectators’ response, as one critic (The Westminster Gazette) remarked, there was little unexpected that could hold attention.

  The abusive tone of the reviews is well represented by The Sunday Times:

  It really was not Mr. Shaw’s fault that we slept. He made all his characters shout and roar, bluster and scream. His piece is a series of interminable harangues, discussions, interjections, ejaculations, observations and verbal explosions dealing in a confused jumble with life, politics, ethics, manners and sex slavery. As a contribution to drama it is negligible. He finishes it with a bomb. If he had not, probably one of the audience would have done the job for him. The piece did not seem concludable otherwise. The noise of the bomb exploding might have awakened the seven sleepers of Ephesus, but it did not awaken one old gentleman to whom Mr. Shaw had administered a sleeping draught compared to which doses of poppy and mandragora were as the blackest coffee …

  Some people may label all these crazy folk, these garrulous, inconsequential maunderers, drivellers and shouters of epigram, philosophy and balderdash as allegorical, but what possible parable can there be in such a mountain of rubbish.

  (23 October 1921)

  Even sympathetic reviewers – such as James Agate in the Saturday Review – missed Shaw’s point, interpreting the play as a purely spiritual statement. However, the general tone was so clearly unfair that the editor of the Sunday Express published an appeal for the critics to re-evaluate the play, and a special matinée was scheduled for them to attend a month after the opening, at which another journalistic supporter (on the Daily Express) had arranged for Shaw to appear and debate the critics. This certainly revised opinions: the Sunday Times now described it as “an agreeable entertainment for the rabidly intellectual and a witty, shrewd – if over long – exposition of Shavian doctrines upon things in general and the English people in particular” (27 November 1921).

  6.4.5 Reviews – New York versus London: The New York Times, 11 November 1920

  With the first production on any stage of the new Shaw play called “Heartbreak House,” the Theatre Guild recorded last evening its most ambitious effort and, all things considered, its most creditable achievement. At the Garrick this brilliant comedy is superbly mounted and, with one fairly insignificant exception, wisely and richly cast. An admirable play has been added to the season’s rather scanty list and overnight that list has quite doubled in cerebral values.

  “Heartbreak House,” despite the doldrums of tedium into which its second act flounders toward the end, is quite the larkiest and most amusing one that Shaw has written in many a year, and in its graver moments the more familiar mood of Shavian exasperation gives way to accents akin to Cassandra’s. Of course that second act seems the more wearing because of our habit and disposition to a lunch-counter tempo, even in the theatre, but inasmuch as the Theatre Guild is not permitted to tamper with the sacred text, it is too bad that its company should feel so oppressed by it.

  A good many of last evening’s blurred impressions can be traced to players so uneasily conscious of the play’s unwonted length that they rattled nervously through their pieces. It will all go better when the conclusion is forced upon them that a mumbled scene may save time, but is the last device in the world to ward off boredom.

  Heartbreak House is Shaw’s Bunyanesque name for cultured, leisured England (or Europe, for that matter) before the war – as distinguished from that part of leisure England called Horseback Hall, wherein the stables are the real centre of the household, and wherein, if any visitor wants to play the piano, he must upset the whole room, there are so many things piled on it.

  The play is his picture of the idly charming but viciously inert and detached people who dwell in Heartbreak House, using their hard-earned (by someone else) leisure to no purpose. They are loitering at the halfway station on the road to sophistication. They have been stripped of their illusions and pretense, but instead of using this freedom to some end they sit around naked and doing nothing, except, perhaps, catching moral colds.

  The moral of the piece is spoken by Captain Shotover. It is always possible to find the clear, honest eyes of Bernard Shaw peering out from behind the thin disguise of one of his characters, and it is tempting in this comedy to identify him at times with this disconcerting and slightly mad old mariner whom the natives suspect of an ability to explode dynamite by looking at it. Captain Shotover is sick of a languid reliance on an overruling Providence. One of the casual ways of Providence with drunken skippers is to run them on the rocks. Not that anything happens, he hastily explains. Nothing but the smash of the drunken skipper’s ship on the rocks, the splintering of her rotten timbers, the tearing of her rusty plates, the drowning of the crew like rats in a trap.

  “And this ship that we are all in?” asks the heroic Hector
. “This soul’s prison we call England?”

  “The Captain is in his bunk,” retorts Captain Shotover, “drinking bottled ditch-water, and the crew is gambling in the forecastle. 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?”

  No wonder the agitated Hector asks what he should do about it.

  “Learn your business, as an Englishman,” replies the Captain, tartly.

  “And what may my business as an Englishman be, pray?”

  “Navigation – Learn it and live, or leave it and be damned.”

  But just then the war visits Heartbreak House in the guise of an air raid that sounds from a distance like Beethoven. It enraptures some, alarms others, and a business man who had hidden too near the Captain’s store of dynamite, destroys the rectory and passes on, leaving Heartbreak House not greatly changed, and with no firmer foundations than it had had before.

  […]

  The air raid which jounces “Heartbreak House” out of its purely conversational vein is capitally managed at the Garrick and both the settings, by Lee Simonson, are rich and beautiful. Indeed, they are almost too handsome. Somehow, a lovely investiture of a Shaw play seems a little incongruous – like perfuming the board room in a bank. The austerity of his text seems to chafe against the Simonson opulence as Shaw himself might rebel disgustedly at any étalage de luxe.

  Saturday Review, 21 October 1921

  Four hours of persistent button-holing at the Court Theatre convinced the dramatic critics that as a simple entertainment Heartbreak House was a failure. But what else it might be they did not try to find out.

  […]

  When Whitman writes: T have said that the soul is not more than the body, And I have said that the body is not more than the soul, And nothing, not God, is greater to one than oneself is’, we must either assent or dissent. Simply to cry out ‘Whitmanesque!’ is no way out. When Ibsen writes a play to prove that building happy homes for happy human beings is not the highest peak of human endeavour, leaving us to find out what higher summit there may be, he intends us to use our brains. It is beside the point to cry out ‘How like Ibsen!’ Heartbreak House is a re-statement of these two themes. You have to get Ibsen thoroughly in mind if you are not to find the Zeppelin at the end of Shaw’s play merely monstrous. It has already destroyed the people who achieve; it is to come again to lighten the talkers’ darkness, and at the peril of all the happy homes in the neighbourhood. You will do well to keep Whitman in mind when you hear the old sea-captain bellowing with a thousand different intonations and qualities of emphasis: ‘Be yourself, do not sleep.’ I do not mean, of course, that Shaw had these two themes actually in mind when he set about this maundering, Tchehovian rhapsody. But they have long been part of his mental make-up, and he cannot escape them or their implications. The difficulty seems to be in the implications. Is a man to persist in being himself if that self run counter to God, or the interests of parish, nation, the community at large? The characters in this play are nearer to apes and goats than to men and women. Shall they nevertheless persist in being themselves, or shall they pray to be Zeppelin-destroyed and born again? The tragedy of the women is the very ordinary one of having married the wrong man. But all these men – liars and humbugs, ineffectual, hysterical, neurasthenic – are wrong men. The play, in so far as it has a material plot, is an affair of grotesque and horrid accouplements. It is monstrous for the young girl to mate in any natural sense with a, superficially considered, rather disgusting old man. Shall she take him in the spirit as a spiritual mate? Shaw holds that she shall, and that in the theatre even spiritual truth shall prevail over formal prettiness. […]

  As this world goes [the old sea-captain] is mad. With him we are to climb Solness’s steeple [in Ibsen’s Masterbuilder] all over again, to catch at ‘harps in the air’. To ears not ghostly attuned he talks a jargon nigh to nonsense; yet through him booms the voice of that restless Force which is Shaw’s conception of God. […]

  The play stands or falls exactly as we get or miss this spiritual hang. As an entertainment pure and simple it is dull and incoherent – even for Shaw. It has all the author’s prolixities and perversities. It has the old fault of combining thinking on a high level with joking on a low one. There is the old confusion of planes. There is the plane upon which the old man and the young girl, spiritual adventurers both, after the manner of Solness and Hilda Wangel, are fitting spiritual mates; but there is also the plane upon which the girl says: ‘I am his white wife; he has a black one already.’ The play is full of the ‘tormented unreticence of the very pure’. Spirituality chambers with lewdness revealed: beauty beds with nastiness which any but the nicest mind had instinctively avoided. On all planes but the highest these people induce nausea. Throughout the evening Stevenson’s ‘I say, Archer – my God, what women!’ came to mind over and over again. ‘What a captain!’ one said in ecstasy, but in the next breath, ‘What a crew!’ This, however, was merely the expression of a predilection. Shaw is concerned with the salvation of all his characters. Nowhere in this play do I find him with his tongue in his cheek. I refuse to believe that his Zeppelin is an irrelevant joke, a device for waking the audience up. If I did not take the author to be perfectly serious I should dismiss the play as a senile impertinence. I found it quite definitely exhilarating and deeply moving, and it therefore ranks for me among the great testaments. When I saw it at the Court Theatre it was admirably acted. The old captain of Mr. Brember Wills was magnificently distraught – Ibsen and Shaw, Whitman and General Booth rolled into one.

  *

  Lawrence Langner, himself a playwright, co-founder of the Washington Square Players that had introduced Chekhov and Eugene O’Neill to the New York stage, and (with Theresa Helburn) one of the main producers of the Theatre Guild, had a vision of the play’s relevance to the post-war world of 1920. This carried over into the successful American production of Heartbreak House by bringing a new note of seriousness to the ending through projecting Shaw’s message into the future.

  The play’s last scene with giant bombers droning over London [sic] was prophetic enough to make many of us feel uncomfortable, and even more of us scared to death, notwithstanding the fact that we had just won a war ‘to make the world safe for democracy,’ as the high-sounding slogan of Woodrow Wilson succinctly put it … Shaw sounded a warning blast against the possible world destruction which would ensue if mankind continued to fail to find a remedy other than war for disputes among nations.

  (G.B.S. and the Lunatic, 1963)

  The play as such specifically deals with Edwardian society and their moral responsibility for the First World War, which provided the immediate context for the apocalypse foreseen in the ending. However, it is this prophetic interpretation that has made Heartbreak House one of the most produced of Shaw’s plays since it was revived by Robert Donat in 1943, in the middle of yet another world war. In the aftermath of German air raids that had destroyed great areas of London and burnt the Houses of Parliament no updating was necessary for the ending to be immediately relevant. Langner commented in his memoirs that “Three times in my own life I have witnesses periods when this play was topical the last being now upon us” (1963). This was the “Cold War” threat of nuclear Armageddon, which was at its height in the early 1960s; there were modern productions that made this nuclear parallel explicit in the staging of the final scene. However, one of the more interesting productions – by Harold Clurman at the Billy Rose Theatre, New York, in 1959 – resisted obviously updating the play.

  While Clurman’s other writings show his awareness of the danger of nuclear annihilation, this only carried over into his production in what he defined as the “spine” of the play’s action – “to get the hell out of this place” – which led him to exaggerate the zany behavior of the characters. In an oblique reference to the then current military doctrine of MAD (Mutual Assured Destruction – which provoked such films as the black farce of
Dr. Strangelove depicting an America ruled by certifiable madmen) the world of Heartbreak House was presented as a lunatic asylum. As Clurman commented in his preparatory notes for the production, the inhabitants of Heartbreak House “are all aware that they are living in a loony world, which they are expected to take seriously – but can’t. As they progress they become aware of the need to act mad in order to approximate reality. To achieve their liberation – their world must be destroyed.”

  “Autobiography”, pp. 231–2.

  Rev. F. W. Aveling, Principal of Taunton Independent College, in leaflet “Down with the Socialists”, August. 1888. See also Professor H. Sidgwick on “Economic Socialism” Contemporary Review, November, 1886.

  That is to say, unfortunately, in nearly all the utterances which profess to guide our social and political action.

  The general impression that the old Poor Law had become an indefensible nuisance is a correct one. All attempts to mitigate Individualism by philanthropy instead of replacing it by Socialism are foredoomed to confusion.

  See Final Report of Royal Commission on Trade Unions, 1869. Vol. 1., p. xvii., sec, 46.

  6 The dash is Shaw’s.

  British Museum, Add. 50600. The copy used was Plays: Unpleasant (London: Grant Richards, 1900). The prompt-book contains no indication of a date of production, though the play was first presented in London by the Stage Society at the New Lyric Club in 1902. In revising the play for the 1931 Standard Edition, Shaw rewrote this scene.

  SELECTED CRITICAL BIBLIOGRAPHY

  Henrik Ibsen

  Clurman, Harold. Ibsen. New York: Macmillan, 1977.

  Durbach, Errol. Ibsen and the Theatre: The Dramatist in Production. New York: New York University Press, 1980.