THEATER CHRONICLE
NEW SETS FOR THE OLD HOUSE
I
F YOU WANT
to make a rational structure of
Heartbreak House
you
can say that it is a sort of layer cake of meanings. The top layer is a
play about a houseful of unhappy, articulate, rudderless English people
of the upper middle class who, while attempting to straighten out their
s'!x relations, are surprised by the air raid of a foreign power. The second
layer is an allegory of the moral and political bankruptcy of the European
leisure class. The mad but profound old sea captain signifies the spirit
~)f
Old England. The captain's two daughters exemplify the class that
was born to govern but that abdicated its responsibility in favor of the
new forces of finance capitalism, represented by the practical business
man. In the one daughter we see the upper-class escape into the strong–
ann philistinism of colonial government; in the other, the retreat into
the dream world of dilettante cultivation. The air raid is the war which
that class has unwittingly prepared for its own destruction. The third
layer is a dramatic exposition of the protean character of human nature.
It is this third layer on which the play rests; yet'it is a foundation neither
fixed nor solid, and it keeps the other elements, superimposed upon it,
in a kind of dizzying perpetual motion.
None of the characters can keep his shape; none is consistent
The captain is wise, but he is also crazy; he is the only strong person on
the stage, but he gets his strength from rum. The powerful capitalist has
no capital; he lives on travelling expenses and commissions. He is a hard
bargainer, but his heart is pitifully vulnerable. The braggart and liar is
a courageous man. The worldly diplomat is a lady's lapdog. The ingenue
is a materialistic schemer. The burglar is no burglar. The churchy old
refonner is a shrewd observer. The conventional snob is a troubled and
intdlligent woman. The great beauty has no power over her husband.
These contradictory traits of character, revealed one by one as the play
goes on, succeed but do not pennanently displace one another. They ebb
and flow through the characters, and it is no accident, I think, that
Heartbreak House is a ship, its owner and philosopher a captain, and
the play's most poetic imagery predominantly marine.
The nightmarish fluidity of the characters inundates the play's
schematism. Since the people will not stay put, since good people will
not be good or bad people bad, the plot misses a point and the allegory
a moral. Yet the failure of the plot, the blurring of the allegory, introduce
into
Heartbreak House
the extra dimension which is so often lacking in
Shaw's work. The third element, by unsettling the other two-the
comedy of morals, and the political allegory-has given the drama an
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