THEATER CHRONICLE
43
and peppery, Mr. Welles is slow and sibylline. The real captain is a
retired man of action; Mr. Welles is a retired armchair prophet. The
funereal deliberation of Mr. Welles's performance obliterates the
distinction made by the playwright between the vigor and enterprise of
the old England and the decadent lassitude of the new, a distinction
which is. the mainspring of the play's political allegory. The contradic–
tions within the captain himself, the drunkenness and madness that
deflect the old man's will and discolor his vision, are likewise suppressed.
Mr. Welles's captain exudes an odor of unmitigated sanctity, and the
play's ultimate and most grotesque irony, which reveals its wise man as
a besotted crank, goes, by unperceived.
The sentimentality of Mr. Welles's acting, the nervelessness of his
direction, the bare, mechanical competence of the majority of his
supporting cast combine to act as a steam roller on Shaw's
Heartbreak
House.
The density of the original structure is lost; the play is flattened
out until it looks like a sketchy blueprint of itself. Mr. Welles's produc–
tion can only serve to remind the public that the original stilI exists in
the library.
Shaw described his own playas a "Fantasia in the Russian manner
on English themes," and in his preface to the published version, he notes
that Chekhov "had produced four fascinating dramatic studies of
H eart–
break House."
One of these was
The Sea Gull)
which has recently been
done by the Theater Guild in association with .the Lunts. The
resemblances between the two plays are only superficial. They have in
common the "futility" which is supposed to be Chekhov's special
property. Both show the disintegration of a cultured, leisured class. Both
emphasize the perverse contradictions of human nature. Both use the
"confession" as a method of revealing character. Shaw's play, however,
deals in generalizations; Chekhov's in particularities. Shaw's people are
thought of as symbols of abstract social ideas; Chekhov's people are
observed concretely, and only in the aggregate become symbolic of a
social order. Shaw's conception of character is inorganic; Chekhov's
organic. The dramatic quick-changes to which the characters of
H eart–
break House
are subjected proceed not from the characters themselves
but from a generalization about human beings in the mind of the
playwright. Even the most complex of the
Heartbreak Howe
people
are literary fabrications, wound together skein by skein. The anti–
thetical traits of Chekhov's people, on the contrary, have grown together
in such a way that it is often impossible to disentangle a single strand.
Even
in
the treatment of the "confession" one sees the artificiality of
Shaw and the simple naturalness of Chekhov. Chekhov's confessions
seem to arise from an artless preoccupation with the self which runs
throughout Russian life and literature. Shaw's confessions are displays
of an impudent and self-conscious exhibitionism which is certainly
characteristic of the playwright but can hardly be said to be typical of
the class and nation he writes about.
There is a certain coldness and poverty-witness the last act of
