Heartbreak House

About

Shaw worked on Heartbreak House from 1913 to 1919 and subtitled it 'a fantasia in the Russian manner on English themes' — a Chekhovian gathering of English upper-class idlers in a house shaped like a ship, presided over by the ancient Captain Shotover, while civilization crumbles outside. The play was Shaw's most personal response to the First World War: a generation that had drifted into catastrophe through incompetence and self-absorption, too cultured to act and too comfortable to care. The ending — bombs falling, characters uncertain whether to be terrified or exhilarated — is one of Shaw's strangest and most haunting theatrical gestures.