Heartbreak House
1919
Heartbreak House is Shaw's devastating portrait of English society asleep at the helm while history bears down on it. Written in the shadow of the First World War but set in the years before, the play unfolds in a house built to resemble a ship, its captain an aging radical who has lost his compass, his daughters two women marooned in different kinds of emptiness, and their guests a rotating gallery of capitalists, bohemians, and seekers who all talk brilliantly and mean nothing. Ellie Dunn arrives searching for purpose and finds only a parade of people performing the roles they imagine suit them. Shaw's great trick is revelation: the man presented as a Napoleon of industry turns out to be penniless; the mild-mannered nobody turns out to be the one actually keeping the world running. What appears solid is hollow. What appears frivolous is desperate. The house is a ship, and no one can agree on where it's headed. It is funny, bitter, and painfully prescient, a play about people who had every advantage and no idea how to use it before the reckoning came.
