How satisfying it is to feast at the banquet of words and ideas provided by the wily Mr. Shaw in his Heartbreak House. Actors Theater of Louisville has set a splendid table for this production of what Shaw, ever in competition with Shakespeare, called his King Lear. But Shaw, in a bow also to the Chekhov he unstintingly admired, subtitled the play "A Fantasia in the Russian Manner on English Themes." This, as he noted in his Preface to Heartbreak House, was Shaw's view of "cultured, leisured Europe before the war" with its English characters substituting for "the same nice people, the same utter futility" as in The Cherry Orchard. Ming Cho Lee's set design is a stunning evocation of Shaw's own stage description of a house that looks like a ship about to run aground or on the verge of sinking.
Ruled over by the wise old, rum-addicted Captain Shotover (exquisitely captured by Kenneth Haigh, who in 1956 was the original Jimmy Porter in John Osborne's Look Back in Anger at London's Royal Court Theatre), the house on a weekend holiday is peopled, among others, by his two daughters, Hesione (Robyn Hunt) and Ariadne (Chick Reid) -- Shaw's Regan and Goneril, and young Ellie Dunn (Julia Dion) -- Shotover's spiritual offspring rather than blood relation, who unlike Shakespeare's Cordelia doesn't die but progresses from vapid dreamer to strong independent woman. In a flawless cast the three women are standouts as is Kent Broadhurst as Hesione's flirtatious husband. His solo fencing scene is hilarious.
Shaw's wit elicits laughter that makes his King Lear comparison oddly inappropriate. Captain Shotover decries Hesione's marriage to a "liar" and Ariadne's to a "numskull." When Ellie asks Hesione, "How can you love a liar?" the reply is Shaw at his piercing best: "I don't know but you can. Otherwise there would not be much love in the world." The pessimism and anger that run through the play and explode in violence at its end are leavened and made bearable by Shaw's clever dialogue. When Hesione reports that the lifeboat her father invented is not bringing in enough money, she tells him, "Living at the rate we do, you cannot afford life saving inventions. Can't you think of something that will murder half Europe at one bang?"
Written before World War I but withheld by Shaw from being staged until war's end, Heartbreak House is as relevant today as it was then. The more things change, the more they are the same.
