42
PARTISAN REVIEW
interior tension, a sense of dubiety and disquietude. The brightness of
the comedy and the grandeur of the allegory intensify this final, anxious
uncertainty and raise it to the level 'of tragic doubt. To the pathos of
the play's lost people is added the terror of the play's lost author, who
could not, in conscience, make his story come out right, or, indeed, come
out at all. F.or the author as well as for the characters the apocalyptic
air raid that finishes the play appears to come as a merciful release from
striving. Like a nervous and abstracted conversationalist, he had already
begun to repeat himself before it happened.
Of the three elements discussed, the first is most conspicuously
present in Orson Welles's production. The Mercury Theater company
act out
Heartbreak House
as if it were one of those weekend comedies
by Rachel Crothers or Frederick Lonsdale. Mady Christians, as the
captain's emancipated daughter, gives a fair imitation of Ina Claire.
With the exception of George Coulouris, whose Boss Mangan is a
genuinely strident, strangled, unhappy, self-made man, the captain's
guests appear to -be the poised, self-confident, ineffably impertinent
loungers that we meet so often at theatrical house parties, though they
lack a good deal of the style and speed to'which we are accustomed. So
far as possible, neuroticism and anxiety have been banished from the
stage. The set, as well as the characters, has been brightened up into
cheerful conventionality: the captain's psychically malodorous house
seems to have been carefully airconditioned. Since this is a play which,
as Shaw himself said, "began with an atmosphere and does not contain
one word that was foreseen before it was written," a play which draws
its life from the ominous thickness of its atmosphere, the effect of Mr.
Welles's housecleaning is obvious. Under such circumstances, the serious
parts of the play lose almost all meaning, and
Heartbreak House
seems
a sentimental misnomer for the gay if languid world in which the
Mercury Theater Shavians dwell.
The failure of Mr. Welles's production to expose the contradictions
that corrode Shaw's people is most damaging in the key cases of Hector
Hushabye, played by Vincent Price, and Captain Shotover, played by
Mr. Welles. Hector Hushabye, as written, is a real fantastico, a
com–
media dell'arte
clown with a touch of nobility,. an extravagant
rhetorician who can be a poet, a ham actor who is tortured by sincerity.
Mr. Price, who was Prince Albert in
Victoria Regina,
plays Hector as
if the two characters had a good deal i'n common. This erratic personage,
who is of all the captain's relatives his most sympathetic listener, is
bleached into a goodlooking, wooden Englishman with a stolid interest
in routine infidelity.
The captain undergoes an even more startling transformation. Mr.
Welles as an actor has always seemed to secrete a kind of viscous holy
oil with which he sprays the rough surfaces of his roles. He has this time
applied so thick a coat that the real Captain Shotover is practically
invisible and what appears on the stage under the captain's name is an
identical twin of the rabbi in
Winterset.
Where the real captain is brisk
