‘There are more things in heaven and earth than are dreamed of in your philosophy, Mrs Condomine.’
(Madame Arcati the medium, humorously quoting Hamlet in Blithe Spirit, Act 2, scene 2)
Blithe Spirit, first staged in 1941, has turned out to be one of Noel Coward’s most popular and regularly revived plays. From my reading of half a dozen of the others I’d hazard a guess that this is because it’s actually about something. ‘Hay Fever’, ‘Easy Virtue’, ‘Private Lives’, ‘Design for Living’, ‘Present Laughter’ – if they’re about anything, it’s farcical arguments and misunderstandings based around people’s fractious love lives; whereas Blithe Spirit has an interesting and genuinely comic premise.
This is that a medium, one Madame Arcati, who a group of cynical upper middle-class types have invited round to hold a séance amid much joking and banter, turns out to everyone’s amazement to be real. There is an afterlife, the spirits of the dead do live on there, and people called mediums can get in touch with them.
But the comic premise goes further than that. The lead male character – witty, cynical Charles Condomine who hosts the séance – lost his first wife, Elvira, seven years ago (to be clear: she died: in a comic detail we are told she laughed so hard at a BBC radio programme that she dropped dead of a heart attack).
He has subsequently married the fragrant and sensible Ruth. But when the medium, Madame Arcati, succeeds in getting in touch with the ‘other world’, guess who’s waiting there to transmit a message to the living? His first wife, Elvira!
His first hint of it is when the medium’s ‘contact’, a girl called Daphne, insists on picking out the record of an Irving Berlin song, ‘Always’, to put on the gramophone to help set the mood. Charles starts a bit, because that was one of Elvira’s favourite songs. But then, once the lights are turned low and Madame Arcati has gone into a trance, Charles insists that he can hear Elvira talking to him, even though no-one else can.
This freaks him out so much that he leaps up and turns the lights on, to reveal Madame Arcati unconscious and flat on her back. To backtrack a bit and explain the plot more fully:
Brief synopsis
Act 1
Scene 1. Setup and arrival of the guests
Charles Condomine is a successful novelist. While dressing for dinner, he and his second wife, Ruth, discuss his first wife, Elvira, who died young, seven years earlier. They also fuss about the new maid, Edith, who is gauche and over-keen, always racing hither and thither and constantly having to be told to calm down and walk.
Charles has invited round for dinner a local couple, Dr and Mrs Bradman. When the guests assemble they make jokes about the third guest who hasn’t yet arrived, for Charles has invited a local eccentric, Madame Arcati, who claims to be a medium. He explains that he’s invited her in order to get background information and colour for a novel he’s planning to write about a fake medium. Madame Arcati arrives, all clattering ‘barbaric’ jewellery.
(As Philip Hoare points out in his excellent biography of Coward, the playwright’s lesbians are often dressed ‘barbarically’ i.e. in modernist necklaces, bangles, patterns and designs. In addition it is made to appear outlandishly eccentric that Madame A likes cycling everywhere. In addition she is given to schoolgirl pep talks: ‘mustn’t give up hope–chin up–never day die’. Coward is quoted in the Hoare biography as saying that as her part grew and grew as he thought up funnier and funnier aspects of her character.)
So now the guests are all assembled they settle down to dinner and the scene closes.
Scene 2. The séance
After dinner the characters prepare to hold the seance. The character of Madame Arcati and her preposterous profession are rich in comic details: such as how the best ‘contacts’ in the other world are children, although Indians are also good. Unless they get over-excited, in which case they go off ‘into their own tribal language’ and are unintelligible.
Madame Arcati’s contact is called Daphne and is ‘rising seven’ years old. Contacts respond well to music and Daphne has a fondness for the songs of Irving Berlin (Madame A drolly remarks that ‘She likes a tune she can hum’). Rifling through Charles’s collection, Madame comes across ‘Always’ by Berlin.
After a lot more palaver, as described above, Madame A raises the ghost of Elvira whose voice only Charles can hear. When he leaps to his feet and turns the lights on Madame A is unconscious on her back. The doctor helps bring her round and after further chat, she leaves. As she does so Elvira appears to us, onstage, dressed in grey with grey make-up on face and flesh, although not seen by anyone else. After some more sceptical chat, Dr and Mrs Bradman also leave.
So now there’s just Charles, Ruth and ghost Elvira onstage. What quickly emerges is that only Charles can see or hear Elvira. Elvira is exactly as selfish and imperious as she was in life and soon she and Charles are bickering like characters in all Coward’s other plays. The cleverness or conceit of this play is that Ruth can only hear Charles’s part of the dialogue. So when he says something rude and sharp to Elvira, Ruth thinks he’s talking to her and gets understandably upset and then cross.
So although the premise is novel enough, the actual meat of the play is like all Coward’s other plays in that the only way the characters can relate to each other is through arguing and bickering and telling each other to shut up.
- CHARLES: Shut up.
- CHARLES: Be quiet, Elvira.
- RUTH: Stop talking like that, Charles.
- CHARLES: Be quiet, she’s doing her best.
- RUTH: Be quiet, you’ll ruin everything.
- CHARLES: Do shut up darling, you’ll make everything worse.
- CHARLES: Don’t be childish, Elvira.
- ELVIRA: Don’t call me your child.
- CHARLES: For heaven’s sake don’t snivel.
- CHARLES: I’m sick of these insults, please go away.
ELVIRA: Oh Charles.
CHARLES: Shut up!
And Coward’s favourite word, idiotic.
- RUTH: Charles, how can you be so idiotic?
- RUTH: Sit down for God’s sake and don’t be idiotic.
- CHARLES: How can I control myself in the face of your idiotic damned stubbornness?
- CHARLES: Don’t be idiotic.
- RUTH: And now, owing to your idiotic inefficiency, we find ourselves in the most mortifying position.
Coward is so aware of the issue that even he himself uses the word ‘bickering’ to describe everyone’s behaviour.
CHARLES: I wish you two would stop bickering for one moment.
ELVIRA: When I think what might have happened if I’d succeeded in getting you to the other world after all – it makes me shudder, it does honestly… It would be nothing but bickering and squabbling for ever and ever and ever.
And all this bickering, as in all Coward’s other plays, tends towards what I’ve called the futility point, the moment when one or both participants in the argument just give up even trying to communicate to the other.
- RUTH: It’s no use arguing any more.
- CHARLES: It doesn’t matter, Ruth… We’ll say no more about it.
- CHARLES: There is nothing to be gained by continuing this discussion.
So in this early phase of Elvira’s haunting the comedy, if it works as comedy, comes from Ruth’s bewilderment at Charles’s unexplained remarks, while there is equal comedy in Charles’s frustration at his inability to make Ruth understand or believe that his first wife has returned from the dead to haunt him.
RUTH: I am not going to stay here arguing any longer.
ELVIRA: Hooray!
CHARLES: Shut up!
RUTH [incensed]: How dare you speak to me like that!
CHARLES: Listen, Ruth, please listen.
RUTH: I will not listen tom any more of this nonsense. I am going up to bed now, I’ll leave you to turn out the lights. I shan’t be asleep – I’m too upset. So you can come in and say goodnight to me if you feel like it.
ELVIRA: That’s big of her, I must say.
CHARLES: Be quiet!
From this little excerpt you can see how what I’ve described as bickering isn’t an incidental feature of the dialogue, it is absolutely central to Coward’s method, the core of his idea of drama, and, if acted correctly, the source of most of the alleged comedy.
There is another thread of comedy which is that Elvira is comically banal and under-excited about being dead or the afterlife. We get no confirmation of whether there’s a heaven or hell, or the Big Question – whether there’s a God, and his Son is Jesus etc. None of that kind of detail. This is a comedy after all. Instead she talks like a blasé Mayfair cocktail party character, can’t really remember any of the details but has gossip about various characters in the afterlife. Thus we learn that Joan of Arc is really ‘a lot of fun’ while Merlin bores everyone with the same old party tricks. So the afterlife sounds exactly like a Noel Coward 1920s cocktail party.
Elvira has only the vaguest sense of where she was and thinks she’s appeared to haunt Charles because she was ‘summoned’ though he swears to her and Ruth that he never summoned anyone. This is an important plot point which we’ll return to.
Meanwhile, Ruth refuses to believe Elvira is there, is instead convinced that Charles is drunk and storms off to bed leaving Charles to recriminate with Elvira.
Act 2
Scene 1
The next morning at breakfast Ruth tells Charles he behave abominably to her the night before and was disgustingly drunk. As you might expect, this quickly degenerates into another Coward slanging match, with both spouses dragging up stories about flings or affairs they had with other people. Charles is given speeches declaring his exasperation with women and claims Ruth is always trying to boss him around (‘You boss and bully and order me about’). This is an important theme, maybe the central theme of the play, which has given rise to predictable accusations of misogyny (see below).
They carry on the argument through and after breakfast and are sitting in armchairs when Elvira walks in through the French windows. Charles is again shocked and starts arguing with Elvira, which Ruth misinterprets as more abuse of her until… Charles persuades Elvira to prove to Ruth that she exists. She does this by moving a bowl of flowers around the room to prove her existence. Ruth thinks it must be a trick, then becomes hysterical, fearing that she’s going mad, while Elvira picks up a chair and waltzes with it. When Ruth tries to escape through the French windows Elvira slams them in her face. When Elvira smashes a vase, Ruth goes into hysterics. End of scene 1.
Scene 2
Later the same day, Ruth has invited Madame Arcati to tea. She has accepted Elvira’s existence, to the extent of casually mentioning that her husband is off driving the ghost for an outing to Folkestone.
In the midst of a lot of banter it emerges that Ruth has invited Madame Arcati round with the simple wish of wanting her to get rid of Elvira, to send her back to ‘dematerialise’ her. But when Ruth admits that Charles didn’t believe she was a real medium and only invited her round to take notes on ‘the tricks of the trade’, offended Madame Arcati leaves in a huff.
Enter Charles and ghost Elvira. Ruth accepts and understands the distinction between when Charles is talking to her (Ruth) and when he’s talking to Elvira. In fact she asks questions of Elvira directly and asks Charles to report back her answers, which he does tactfully since many of Elvira’s replies are barbed and aggressive. When Ruth reports that Madame Arcati doesn’t think she can dematerialise Elvira, the latter crows in triumph: she will spend the rest of her life with her beloved Charles!
But the conversation degenerates and Ruth says next day she’s going up to London to the Psychical Research Society to see if they can help, and if they can’t she’ll go to see the Archbishop of Canterbury, and she slams out of the room (again).
Charles and Elvira have a relatively civilised conversation and he says he’s going off to dress for dinner and exits. The scene ends with some comic business when Elvira puts the record of ‘Always’ on the gramophone and is dancing round to it when Edith the gawky maid comes in, turns the gramophone off and files the record away, at which Elvira takes it out and puts it back on the gramophone – with the result that Edith runs out the room screaming.
Worth mentioning that this is a tried and tested Coward strategy, of having one song be repeatedly played and mentioned throughout a play, so that at the end of the evening the audience would come out humming it. In this play it’s Berlin’s song ‘Always’, compare Coward’s use of his own song, ‘Someday I’ll Find You’, in Private Lives.
Scene 3
A few days later, in the same drawing room, Ruth is talking to Mrs Bradman because the doctor has popped round to have a look at Charles’s arm, which he appears to have sprained. The doctor says he’s a bit worried about Charles because during his inspection, he kept letting fly irrelevant remarks. Of course Ruth and the audience know these were aimed at Elvira, of whose existence Dr B knows nothing. Also, Edith seems to have had an accident and fallen, on the same day.
At this point Charles enters with his arm in a sling. He’s insisting he drive into Folkestone but the doctor advises against it. Ruth knows the Folkestone trip is because Elvira wants to go to the cinema. Charles sees the doctor out while Elvira teases Ruth by throwing rose stems at her from a vase.
When Charles returns Ruth tells him she’s convinced Elvira is trying to kill him. This explains the recent accidents: Edith fell down the stairs and banged her head because the whole of the top stair was covered in axle grease, while Charles had the accident on the ladder which hurt his arm because the ladder had been sawed nearly in two. Why? So Charles will pass over into the spirit world and be Elvira’s forever.
Ruth convinces Charles she’s right and they are discussing what to do, whether Madame Arcati can do anything, when Elvira sweeps in again. Charles alerts Ruth to the fact, and they change the subject. Although she still can’t see or hear Elvira, Ruth tells her off for making her husband drive her to Folkestone that evening, and storms out (again).
Charles and Elvira engage in some more banter and bickering about how poor Ruth’s taste in household furnishing is etc. This is padding to cover time because when Elvira asks Charles can’t they go into Folkestone now, he casually says no, because Ruth’s taken the car to go and see the vicar.
At this news Elvira leaps out of her chair and becomes extremely agitated, repeating ‘Oh God oh God’. Charles begins to suspect something about the car, then suddenly realises that Elvira has sabotaged it. He is just accusing her of it when the phone rings. He picks it up and we only hear his side of the conversation but it’s something about an accident down by the bridge.
And at this moment the door swings open and Elvira steps back in horror, then shields her head from blows and cries out, ‘Ruth, stop it’.
Clearly 1) Elvira did sabotage the car 2) Ruth crashed it and was killed 3) she has ‘passed over’ and now exists on the same spectral plane as Elvira where 4) she is attacking her. And on this bombshell the scene ends.
It is an important plot point that the audience, and Charles, at this point cannot see Ruth. But there’s no doubt that she’s died and come back from the dead.
Act 3
Scene 1
It is a few days later. Presumably there’s been a funeral for Ruth etc. Charles is waiting by the fire and Madame Arcati is shown in. She offers her condolences but is spookily aware that Elvira had something to do with Ruth’s death. Elvira appears – note that even Madame Arcati can’t see her and has to have Charles point out to her where she is and what she’s saying.
Part of the comedy is that Madame Arcati is as gleeful as a child that Elvira has returned. She asks for proof and Elvira blows on her ear which makes Madame A cackle with pleasure.
Elvira, for her part, is fed up, she hates Ruth being on her plane because she’s endlessly taunting her. She now wants to be exorcised or dematerialised. Charles asks Madame A to step into the dining room for a moment because he wants to talk to Elvira. This, of course, turns into an argument, with them both taunting each other with the affairs they had during their marriage, she with Guy Henderson and Captain Bracegirdle, he with Cynthia Cheviot.
As this bickering makes them both really miserable Elvira begs Charles to call Madame Arcati back into the room., She comes and there’s a lot of palaver and stage business with salt and pepper and herbs as she lays everything out for her dematerialisation. She claims to be following a formula from Edmondson’s Witchcraft and its Byways.
She puts music on the gramophone, turns off the lights and asks her contact on the other side to tap the table for messages, but the tapping gets stronger and stronger until Madame Arcati falls over, pulling the table on top of her.
When Charles switches the lights on and pulls the table off her and revives Madame Arcati, he points out that Elvira is still here, nothing happened to her, but Madame Arcati insists that something happened, and at that moment the figure of Ruth, herself as grey as Elvira, sweeps in through the French windows. I think that up till this moment she had been an unearthly presence. So I think what’s happened is that Madame Arcati’s spell has backfired and fully invoked or materialised her to the same level as Elvira.
Now Charles has two angry ex-wives to cope with. End of scene.
Scene 2
It’s a few hours later and the room is in disarray with various objects (crystal ball, Ouija board) arranged to give the impression that a variety of further spells and incantations (‘the most humiliating hocus-pocus’) have been tried and all failed. Madame Arcati is fast asleep on the sofa.
The two women ghosts are exhausted and humiliated. They complain that they’ve had to sit through no fewer than five séances and innumerable spells and have completely failed to dematerialise.
What begins to develop or become clear is the division between Charles and the two women. Elvira and Ruth have buried the hatchet and are now in league against him, joining common cause in finding him boorish and unhelpful. And he finds himself outnumbered and exasperated with him. It’s now that he delivers what in one sense is the play’s defining line (and the defining line of so many Coward plays):
CHARLES: I wish you two would stop bickering for one moment.
So the ghosts goad Charles into waking Madam Arcati up for one last try. It is that this point that a key fact is discovered: All the women (Elvira, Ruth and Madame A) have been insisting it was Charles who called them into being: the two ghost women recall answering an overwhelming call for them to appear in the Condomine house. Suddenly Madame A has a brainwave. She grabs her crystal ball and sees something white, like a bandage. She scampers round, waves a bunch of garlic, makes cabbalistic signs and chants a spell.
And into the room comes Edith, the scatty servant. Wearing a white bandage round her head. She asks Charles why he called her but of course he didn’t – Madame Arcati did! At first she pretends she can’t see the two ghosts but soon makes a slip and they realise that she can. It was her. She has the gift. She is a Natural.
Madame Arcati swiftly hypnotises Edith and tells her she knows what she has to do i.e. reverse her call to Ruth and Elvira. So Madame A gets Edith to softly sing ‘Always’ (remember what I said about Coward cannily threading a theme song throughout many of his plays?) Sensing they are about to disappear, both Ruth and Elvira hurry to get in some last messages to Charles but their voices fade and then disappear.
Hooray! Madame A wakes Edith from her trance and Charles gives her a pound for her troubles. For a split second there is a moment of naughtiness, because Edith can’t remember how she got there or what’s just happened, and for a moment she misinterprets the pound to mean that she’s been taken advantage off and she runs out the room squealing.
Charles, rather like the confirmed misogynist Henry Higgins in Pygmalion, doesn’t understand, though the audience – or some of the audience – does.
Charles is hugely relieved and is effusively thanking Madame A when she utters words of caution. She tells him to pack his bags and leave. Why on earth? And Madame A explains that… they may still be here! Even though he can’t see or hear them… the house may still be haunted. She gives him a parting warning to pack his bags and go far away (while she herself is packing up all her paraphernalia) and then she takes her leave.
Charles is alone onstage, pondering. Tempting fate, he starts to talk to Elvira and Ruth, teasing them, telling them how happy he is to be free of them, and of women generally in his life. At which the vase on the mantelpiece falls to the floor. Of course! They are still here!
So: he takes the opportunity to let rip: first he tells Elvira that he knew about her affairs all along, what she didn’t know about was him and Paula Westlake! Then he turns to Ruth and says he was faithful to her but was being alienated by her increasingly domineering behaviour and it was only a matter of time… at which the clock strikes sixteen!
He bids them both goodbye as a sofa cushion is thrown at him, ducks it and tells them they’re welcome to smash up the house as much as they like – as the curtains are pulled up and down, the gramophone lid opens and shuts, the overmantel shakes. He eggs them on, telling Ruth to give Elvira a hand, as a statuette on the bookshelf falls down, and as he makes his amused exit all hell breaks loose, with vases falling, the curtains falling, the gramophone playing ‘Always’ speeded up, the overmantel collapsing, the curtain rod crashing down and anything else the director can think of.
THE END
Misogyny
In his biography Hoare quotes a woman director as saying the play is very funny but the ending reeks of misogyny. Certainly the last couple of pages where he delights in getting rid of the two ghosts, and then taunts them, have a certain fierceness. A series of remarks about being free of women climaxes with this little peroration.
CHARLES: You said in one of your more acid moments, Ruth, that I had been hag-ridden all my life! How right you were – but now I’m free Ruth dear, not only of Mother and Elvira and Mrs Winthrop Llewellyn, but free of you too and I should like to take this farewell opportunity of saying I’m enjoying it immensely!
Not Andrew Tate, is it, but it is the conclusion of a distinct trend in the play. Why does this play and not most of his others display this tone? Maybe it comes from something in Coward’s attitude. But maybe it’s simpler, maybe it’s simply the logical conclusion of the tendency of the of the characters, implicit in the initial setup, maybe Coward followed the logic of the basic scenario and Charles’s gratitude to be rid of the two haunters is comic vehemence.
Movie version
‘Blithe Spirit’ was promptly made into a movie, released in 1945, directed by David Lean who Coward had collaborated with on another adaptation of a recent play, ‘This Happy Breed’. The film starred two of the main actors from the original stage production, namely Kay Hammond as Elvira and Margaret Rutherford as Madame Arcati. Constance Cummings played Ruth and Rex Harrison stepped into Coward’s shoes to play Charles.
Out of the country during the filming, Coward was less happy with the result than with Lean’s version of ‘This Happy Breed’, thinking it too static and stagey. Watching it, you can’t help agreeing, despite the film version’s attempts to get out of the living room at every opportunity, with several scenes driving along in a car or at Madame Arcati’s house.
The general clunkiness is driven home by the film’s drastic departure from the play’s ending. The play ends with Charles swanning off abroad, leaving the women smashing up his house in frustration. The film ends with Charles merrily driving down towards the bridge where Ruth crashed, while the ghosts watch smiling, because they’ve sabotaged the car, again. The car crashes and seconds later Charles plonks down on the bridge beside his two ex-wives. In the play, man triumphs, two women left fuming. In the film, the two women win. No doubt this sounded like a funny idea in the script conferences, but the clumsy clunkiness with which it’s shot, the lack of any punchline and the film’s abrupt ending, all leave you with an impression of clumsiness.
Coward’s negative opinion was reflected in the film’s lack of box office success – but it has subsequently come to be valued for its Technicolor photography and Oscar-winning visual effects.
Books & Boots 
Heartbreak House: A Fantasia in the Russian Manner on English Themes by George Bernard Shaw (1919)
NURSE GUINNESS: You’ll get used to it, miss: this house is full of surprises for them that don’t know our ways.
This is, until the last few pages, a very funny comic play, comparable to Pygmalion for its vivid characters and the frequency of its comic moments.
In the characteristically long (13,800 words) preface, Shaw informs us that he began the play in 1913, before a shot had been fired, but worked on and completed it in the first two years of the First World War. He didn’t let it be performed during the conflict out of tact and patriotism so it was first staged in 1919.
Shaw is so keen to emphasise that he began it before the war because he wants to give a prophetic force. He goes on to tell us that ‘Heartbreak House’ is not just a location in his play but is a symbol for the entire leisured lifestyle of the rich in the pre-war years, their heedlessness of the volcano they were dancing on, their selfishness and self-centredness.
The setting of a country house weekend is very appropriate. Maybe these kinds of civilised long weekends continue to this day, but country house parties where a diverse group of guests are brought together to interact are certainly a feature of Edwardian, Georgian and 1920s literature. Think of all those Agatha Christie novels where a bunch of suspects gather at the charming house of Lord or Lady something before one of them dies in mysterious circumstances, or the country house party novels of Aldous Huxley (although, admittedly, Captain Shotover’s house isn’t as grand as all that).
Act 1. Captain Shotover’s villa in Sussex, the poop: evening
We are in the living room at Heartbreak House, located in north Sussex, with (as so often in plays) French windows giving on to the garden where the author can conveniently dispose of characters when they aren’t needed or retrieve them from when they are.
It is however a very odd-looking room and sets the tone for a lot of the comedy to come, for it is built and decorated to resemble ‘the after part of an old-fashioned high-pooped ship, with a stern gallery. Thus the windows are ship-built with heavy timbering and run right across the room as continuously as the stability of the wall allows; a row of lockers under the windows provides an un-upholstered window seat interrupted by twin glass doors, and the stage directions from start to finish refer not to stage left or right but to port and starboard.
This visual oddity sets the tone for the room and the house belong to the 88-year-old eccentric (or plain senile) inventor Captain Shotover. A modern reader might wonder whether Shotover has dementia, certainly several of the characters describe him as ‘mad’, but really he’s a comic invention, a man, already eccentric, who has reached the age where he doesn’t mind what he says to anyone, with the result that he is continually blunt to the point of rudeness, and beyond.
NURSE GUINNESS: They say he sold himself to the devil in Zanzibar before he was a captain; and the older he grows the more I believe them.
Among his many inventions (which he makes good money from) are for the ship with the magnetic keel that sucked up submarines and a patent lifeboat, but he is currently engaged on a grand visionary notion of creating some kind of rather Wellsian-sounding Death Ray which will defeat The Enemy before he can lift a finger.
CAPTAIN SHOTOVER: But I go on with the dynamite none the less. I will discover a ray mightier than any X-ray: a mind ray that will explode the ammunition in the belt of my adversary before he can point his gun at me…
To this end he has a store of dynamite in the quarry. Rather like the introduction of a revolver in a Chekhov play, as soon as we learn this we wonder how long it’ll be before it explodes although this, like everything, is turned into suave comedy.
MRS HUSHABYE: There’s nothing to see in the garden except papa’s observatory, and a gravel pit with a cave where he keeps dynamite and things of that sort. However, it’s pleasanter out of doors; so come along.
RANDALL: Dynamite! Isn’t that rather risky?
MRS HUSHABYE: Well, we don’t sit in the gravel pit when there’s a thunderstorm.
Shotover is also given an obscure hobbyhorse, repeatedly banging on about striving to achieve ‘the seventh degree of concentration, whatever that may be.
One by one the cast appear, introduced to us and to each other in increasingly complex sequences and revealing a number of sometimes complex relationships. Here’s my attempt at a summary.
Cast
Captain Shotover – ‘an ancient but still hardy man with an immense white beard, in a reefer jacket with a whistle hanging from his neck’. Father to two daughters, Ariadne (now Lady Utterword) and Hesione (Mrs Hushabye). The second, married to Hector Hushabye, still lives with him. The first, (Lady Utterword) couldn’t wait to leave home, married Hasting Utterword 23 years ago, and was whisked off as his wife to umpteen colonies where he served as governor.
Shotover has a kind of cartoon version of senile dementia or at least is completely heedless of manners and conventions. He is entertainingly rude to everyone. As his daughter explains:
MRS HUSHABYE: You will find it far less trouble to let papa have his own way than try to explain.
As to his ‘eccentricity’ it’s genuinely funny the way he mistakes an invited guest to his house, Ellie, as his daughter, and then refuses to believe Lady Utterword – who he hasn’t seen for 25 years – is his other daughter.
Nurse Guinness – the house is looked after by Nurse Guinness, ‘an elderly womanservant’ who, in the best comic tradition, calmly ignored Shotover’s criticisms and indeed, everyone else’s, whilst quietly, efficiently getting on.
Ellie Dunn – ‘a pretty girl, slender, fair, and intelligent looking, nicely but not expensively dressed, evidently not a smart idler’, has been invited to stay by Mrs Hushabye aka Hesione. Three things about her: 1) her father is poor Mazzini Dunn, who set up a business which went bankrupt, was bought for a song by the pirate capitalist Mangan (who he went to school with), who re-employed him as manager. 2) This same Mangan (same age as her father) subsequently bumped into Ellie a couple of times and now assumes they are now engaged, despite not having asked Ellie, who is extremely reluctant. 3) Not least because she has fallen in love with a handsome charismatic man who’s had the most marvellous adventures, the improbably named Marcus Darnley.
Mazzini Dunn, poor bankrupt father of Ellie Dunn, has also been invited to stay. His Italian first name is a reference to Giuseppe Mazzini the spearhead of the movement for Italian Reunification (they were poets and visionaries).
‘Boss’ Alfred Mangan, ‘the bloated capitalist’ in Hector’s view who, it is strongly implied, stitched up his schoolfriend Mazzini Dunn. A very ordinary looking man he is driven by strong ambition and can be very assertive. He bumped into Ellie at the National Gallery, took her for a ride in his carriage and now assumes she is ‘his’.
Lady Utterword (Ariadne or ‘Addy’) – ‘a blonde, is very handsome, very well dressed, and so precipitate in speech and action that the first impression (erroneous) is one of comic silliness’. She has spent 23 years abroad with her posh husband, Sir Hastings Uttword, who has been governor of all the crown colonies in succession. Shotover several times refers to him as a ‘numskull’ and he never appears in the play. Instead:
Randall Utterword, younger brother of Hastings Utterword, Ariadne’s husband, turns up.
Hesione Hushabye (‘Miss Hessy’), married to dashing lover and fantasist Hector Hushabye. She was born when Shotover was 46 and since he is now 88, she must be
Hector Hushabye the seducer. It is a very funny moment when Ellie has just finished telling Hesione all about the marvellous man she’s met who tells the most amazing stories, and he walks through the door onto the stage and Hesione announces that he is her husband! Ellie is genuinely devastated (to some extent she’s the only character in the play with realistic feelings) but it turns out that Hector and Hesione have a very ‘modern’ marriage and she totally understand his addiction to falling in love with and flirting with numerous other women.
HECTOR: She has the diabolical family fascination. I began making love to her automatically. What am I to do?
This frank admission of his inability to stop philandering is still funny today but it’s just one of the
Act 1 ends with a dialogue between Hector and Shotover which is so disturbing it’s hard to know how seriously to take it. It begins with Hector asking why the Captain has a store of dynamite (to blow up The Enemy) and develops into the notion that it might be a good idea to blow up everyone.
HECTOR: I tell you I have often thought of this killing of human vermin. Many men have thought of it. Decent men are like Daniel in the lion’s den: their survival is a miracle; and they do not always survive. We live among the Mangans and Randalls and Billie Dunns as they, poor devils, live among the disease germs and the doctors and the lawyers and the parsons and the restaurant chefs and the tradesmen and the servants and all the rest of the parasites and blackmailers. What are our terrors to theirs? Give me the power to kill them; and I’ll spare them in sheer –
CAPTAIN SHOTOVER [cutting in sharply]: Fellow feeling?
HECTOR: No. I should kill myself if I believed that. I must believe that my spark, small as it is, is divine, and that the red light over their door is hell fire. I should spare them in simple magnanimous pity.
CAPTAIN SHOTOVER: You can’t spare them until you have the power to kill them. At present they have the power to kill you. There are millions of blacks over the water for them to train and let loose on us. They’re going to do it. They’re doing it already.
HECTOR: They are too stupid to use their power.
CAPTAIN SHOTOVER [throwing down his brush and coming to the end of the sofa]: Do not deceive yourself: they do use it. We kill the better half of ourselves every day to propitiate them. The knowledge that these people are there to render all our aspirations barren prevents us having the aspirations. And when we are tempted to seek their destruction they bring forth demons to delude us, disguised as pretty daughters, and singers and poets and the like, for whose sake we spare them.
HECTOR [sitting up and leaning towards him]: May not Hesione be such a demon, brought forth by you lest I should slay you?
CAPTAIN SHOTOVER: That is possible. She has used you up, and left you nothing but dreams, as some women do.
HECTOR: Vampire women, demon women.
CAPTAIN SHOTOVER: Men think the world well lost for them, and lose it accordingly.
Is this fantastical comedy? Is sane Hector egging mad Shotover onto ever more outrageous pronouncements? Or are they both maniacs feeding each other’s paranoid fantasies? When Shotover talks about ‘millions of blacks’ about to be let loose on ‘us’, is this clinical paranoia? And the conceit at the end about pretty women being a kind of distraction created by The Enemy so we ‘spare them’, what?
In fact things are clarified just a few minutes later. Hesione enters, breaking the spell of this dialogue, and the Captain scuttles off into his pantry, to one side of the room – at which Hector comments to his wife that, ‘He is madder than usual.’ So it was an act. So Hector was just egging the old madman on to wilder fantasies.
In his day the standard criticism of Shaw was that his plays were wordy expositions of his views, arguments spouted by two-dimensional mouthpieces. But the little scene I’ve just quoted shows how wrong this is. There are many purely comic passages, but also passages like this of wild fantasia, which are beyond argumentation, which take you into strange visionary places (cf the scenes with Peter Keegan in ‘John Bull’s Other Island’, especially the long scene where he talks to a grasshopper!).
And the notion of an all-killing death ray is treated comically by all the members of his family, who take it as another one of Daddy’s madcap schemes. At the very end of Act 1 Hesione complains to Shotover and Hector that they’re broke and they both beg him to come up with a new invention.
MRS HUSHABYE: Yes, dear; but that was for the ship with the magnetic keel that sucked up submarines. 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?
CAPTAIN SHOTOVER: No. I am ageing fast. My mind does not dwell on slaughter as it did when I was a boy.
I suppose passages like this are what Shaw meant by ‘prophetic’ of the huge slaughter about to commence across Europe, and/or satirise the wish of perfectly respectable middle-class types to devise ever-more destructive weapons of mass murder. But what makes ‘Heartbreak House’ so attractive is the way even quite bitter sentiments are embedded in lovely humour.
CAPTAIN SHOTOVER: Why doesn’t your husband invent something? He does nothing but tell lies to women.
HECTOR: Well, that is a form of invention, is it not?
Act 2. Same as Act 1: after dinner
Mangan deliberately tells Ellie that he cold-bloodedly ruined her father, sitting her down and carefully explaining how he gave her money the seed money for his business knowing he’d work his fingers to the bone to get it going, but lack the business nous to make a go of it, leading to bankruptcy, at which point Mangan could pick it up for a song and make a fortune.
He tells her all this to put her off him, but to his amazement Ellie says she’ll still have him. Further paradoxes follow in an amusing tumble. He tries to dismay her by saying he’s in love with someone else, but she just says, so is she! All this cut and thrust makes Mangan think ‘this is a crazy house’ till Ellie goes behind him and draws her hands from his forehead to his ears again and again and lulls him to sleep, turns out the light and tiptoes out.
Nurse Guinness comes into the darkened room, trips over Mangan’s legs, tries to wake him then screams that she’s killed him. Mrs Hushabye and Mazzini come running and, when they can’t wake him up, Mazzini quickly guesses that he’s been hypnotised by Ellie and describes how she did it to him once, at a family party.
Their conversation turns into a very inappropriate flirtation which Mazzini resists because he says he has only ever loved once (his wife). Also, Mazzini claims that Mangan is actually useless at business, doesn’t manage the men or the day to day. He’s only rich because he obsesses over every penny and does that because he is terrified of being poor.
Ellie is fetched and denies having hypnotised Mangan. The two women send Mazzini packing then have a set-to about the sleeping Captain of Industry. Hesione thinks she has to save Ellie from this dreadful marriage but Ellie surprises her by being utterly, cynically clear eyed about her motives in marrying Mangan: it is for his money and also because, being old, he can’t expect her to love him, which she doesn’t.
This verbal sparring on goes on for a while, with Ellie lamenting that Hector is spoken for and didn’t wait for her, and during which Hesione naughtily admits that her lovely head of hair is mostly fake. I think the fake hair stands for all sorts of other attitudes, fronts and statements which are fake.
They wake Mangan and it turns out he was conscious the whole time and heard everything they said about him, Mazzini saying he’s rubbish at business, Hesione and Ellie calling him a lump. He sets about accusing Ellie, again, but once again she trumps him, defeating everything he says with irony, paradox or strong will, making him feel hysterical, like he’s going mad:
MANGAN [desperately]: In this house a man’s mind might as well be a football. I’m going…
The others come in and mock Mangan, whose Christian name, they’ve discovered is Alfred, but in the middle there’s a shot from upstairs.
All the characters run upstairs, then return in dribs and drabs with the knackered old burglar they’ve caught. it was Mazzini who meant to scare him with Hector’s duelling pistol which went off at the slightest touch.
The burglar says it’s a fair cop but gives a speech embodying one of Shaw’s hobby horses, how barbaric it is to lock people in prison (discussed at length in the preface to Major Barbara). Hector, and then all the guests, suggest they let him go but the burglar insists he should serve his time, which prompts Mangan to remark that even the burglars don’t behave naturally in this house.
Mazzini suggests the burglar could turn himself into an honest locksmith and the burglar says, yes, he could set up shop for £20 and then, somehow, the situation turns all the way round so that the burglar who they only apprehended a little earlier, is now demanding that they have a whip round to cough up at least £20 for him.
Hector gives him a sovereign and tells him to be off but he bumps into Captain Shotover in the doorway who surprises everyone by declaring that this is the mate of his old ship, Billy Dunn. Dunn explains that he breaks into houses in order to get caught and then shames the liberal guests into giving him a whip round.
More amazement when the calmly competent housekeeper, Nurse Guinness, reveals that Billy is her husband! The captain orders that Billy be held in the kitchens.
Meanwhile, Alfred Mangan is put out because everyone is ignoring him so Mrs Hushabye invites him for a walk on the moonlit terrace and for some reason this makes him burst into tears. Ellie explains that his heart is breaking but this makes Lady Utterword furious and she berates Ellie then exits onto the terrace. Ellie is bewildered until Captain Shotover explains that all her life Lady Utterword (his daughter Ariadne) has wanted someone to break her heart but now she’s so old she wonders whether she has a heart to break. Humorously all the other characters go running out to comfort her leaving Mazzini, Ellie and the Captain. Mazzini kisses his daughter goodnight and goes out.
Long scene with Ellie and the Captain who is the only person she feels she can talk to. She finds out more about his life, that the happiest experience of his life was being on the bridge of his ship during a 168-hour-long typhoon, that he spread the story that he’d sold his soul to the Devil in order to cow men so degraded that otherwise he could only manage them with kicks and cuffs. She explains why she’s marrying Mangan i.e. for his money and because being rich is better than being poor and the Captain delivers a surprisingly coherent sermon about gaining his money but losing her soul.
But he also delivers some haunting speeches about what it’s like to be very old (in 1920 the life expectancy for men was 56, Shotover is more than 30 years older than that) like in this admission about why he keeps running off stage into the pantry. It’s to take a shot of rum but not because he’s an alcoholic:
CAPTAIN SHOTOVER: No, I dread being drunk more than anything in the world. To be drunk means to have dreams; to go soft; to be easily pleased and deceived; to fall into the clutches of women. Drink does that for you when you are young. But when you are old: very, very old, like me, the dreams come by themselves. You don’t know how terrible that is: you are young: you sleep at night only, and sleep soundly. But later on you will sleep in the afternoon. Later still you will sleep even in the morning; and you will awake tired, tired of life. You will never be free from dozing and dreams; the dreams will steal upon your work every ten minutes unless you can awaken yourself with rum. I drink now to keep sober; but the dreams are conquering: rum is not what it was: I have had ten glasses since you came; and it might be so much water.
Or:
CAPTAIN SHOTOVER: I am too weary to resist, or too weak. I am in my second childhood. I do not see you as you really are. I can’t remember what I really am. I feel nothing but the accursed happiness I have dreaded all my life long: the happiness that comes as life goes, the happiness of yielding and dreaming instead of resisting and doing, the sweetness of the fruit that is going rotten.
See what I mean by the strange visionary quality of some of these scenes and speeches? Startlingly, having listened to him, Ellie confirms that all she wants is to marry a rich old man and asks whether he is rich. Maybe she should marry him! When the Captain says what’s wrong with her to say something like that she admits her heart was broken; she was genuinely in love with ‘Marcus Darnley’ and was heartbroken to learn he is really Hector Hushabye and married to Hesione.
Hector and Randall come in which is Ellie’s prompt to take the Captain by the hand out into the garden and leave the two men. The crux of their scene is they both fancy Lady Utterword, Randall as her husband’s brother, Hector as her sister (Hesione)’s husband. Randall explains that Lady Utterword enjoys flirting with men everywhere, makes endless scenes, her husband (his brother) doesn’t notice because he works 16 hours a day. He is upset because Hector has flirted with her more in ten minutes than he has in ten years.
Hector calls Lady Utterword in, explains the situation and Lady U upbraids Randall for being so tiresome and jealous, as if they were married and proceeds to demolish his character, calling him selfish, lazy, whiney, as needy as a 3-year-old, and that his nickname is Randall the Rotter. This reduces Randall to tears and Lady U stands domineeringly over him and mocks him as a crybaby.
Hector is upset by her bullying and, grabbing her by the throat, throws her down into a chair. She rather enjoys this domination. She explains that she treats Randall like a child, bullies him into having a good cry and then he feels better afterwards. She stalks out and Randall, just as she predicted, after his good cry feels cleansed and sleepy. Feebly he says he’ll get his own back on her by going to bed without saying goodnight. Hector realises what a feeble specimen he is and is left raging against his subjugation by the Shotover sisters.
Act 3. In Captain Shotover’s garden: night
Late at night all the characters are outside under the stars, mooning and dreaming, or at least that’s what you’d hope. In actual fact, there are inklings and prophecies of doom. Inkling:
MRS HUSHABYE [coming to the back of the garden seat, into the light, with Mangan]: He keeps telling me he has a presentiment that he is going to die. I never met a man so greedy for sympathy.
MANGAN [plaintively]: But I have a presentiment. I really have. And you wouldn’t listen.
MRS HUSHABYE: I was listening for something else. There was a sort of splendid drumming in the sky. Did none of you hear it? It came from a distance and then died away.
MANGAN: I tell you it was a train.
MRS HUSHABYE: And I tell you, Alf, there is no train at this hour.
Prophecy:
HECTOR. Heaven’s threatening growl of disgust at us useless futile creatures. [Fiercely]. I tell you, one of two things must happen. Either out of that darkness some new creation will come to supplant us as we have supplanted the animals, or the heavens will fall in thunder and destroy us.
Lady Utterword says the problem with Heartbreak House is there aren’t any horses.
LADY UTTERWORD: There are only two classes in good society in England: the equestrian classes and the neurotic classes. It isn’t mere convention: everybody can see that the people who hunt are the right people and the people who don’t are the wrong ones.
She delivers a diatribe against Randall’s immature self-centred character, imagining he is in bed asleep but is interrupted by the sound of the flute, an instrument he plays, from his bedroom.
The ladies turn their attention to Mr Mangan, asking him point blank whether he intends to marry Ellie and how much he is worth. After protesting at having his personal affairs discussed in public like this, Mangan makes the surprise admission that he has no money. Turns out he doesn’t own any of the factories and whatnot he’s associated with, he merely administers them for the real owners, the shareholders and syndicates.
When Mrs Hushabye jokes that, with his level of deception he ought to go into politics, Mangan jokes that he was invited to join the government, unelected, and be put in charge of a department. See how nothing changes. He didn’t achieve anything in his own department but managed to undermine his rivals in all the others, all the while keeping his eye on the title he’d been promised. Incompetence, corruption and complete lack of experience rose to high political positions 100 years ago as they do today. In our time he’d have been put in charge of screwing up the Brexit negotiations or procuring billions of pounds of unusable PPE equipment.
HECTOR. Is this England, or is it a madhouse?
Outraged, Lady Utterword says her husband could ‘save the country’ if only we got rid of this:
… ridiculous sham democracy and give Hastings the necessary powers, and a good supply of bamboo to bring the British native to his senses
I.e. set up a dictatorship. Mrs Hushabye mockingly trumps her by saying it doesn’t matter who claims to be running the country as long as ‘we’, i.e. women, are running the men. Ellie laments how everything has let her down and turned out to be fake:
All these admissions drive Mangan wild and he suggests that, since they have stripped themselves morally naked they might as well take all their clothes off and he commences. The others stop him and when he goes to leave, talk him out of it. Alright, the exhausted man says, I’ll stay and propose to Ellie.
But Ellie surprises by saying she doesn’t want him any more. She was just testing her strength. Anyway, it would be an act of bigamy because half an hour earlier she married Captain Shotover!!!!
ELLIE: Yes: I, Ellie Dunn, give my broken heart and my strong sound soul to its natural captain, my spiritual husband and second father. [She draws the captain’s arm through hers, and pats his hand. The captain remains fast asleep.]
It is a spiritual wedding and she doesn’t even know what she means but it is a beautiful evening and she is happy. Her father, Mazzini appears, in pyjamas and a silk dressing gown, claiming he can’t sleep with such a fascinating conversation going on under his window and the others bring him up to speed, especially the news that her daughter is no longer going to marry Mangan who turns out not to be a millionaire. Mangan for his part complains about being perpetually ganged up on, which triggers the speech which explains the play’s title.
MANGAN: There you go again. Ever since I came into this silly house I have been made to look like a fool, though I’m as good a man in this house as in the city.
ELLIE [musically]: Yes: this silly house, this strangely happy house, this agonizing house, this house without foundations. I shall call it Heartbreak House.
And further lucubrations which we know from Shaw’s preface that he intended allegorically or symbolically.
HECTOR: Do you accept that name for your house?
CAPTAIN SHOTOVER: It is not my house: it is only my kennel.
HECTOR: We have been too long here. We do not live in this house: we haunt it.
By contrast Lady Utterword, who escaped the place as soon as she could, aged 19, has no illusions.
LADY UTTERWORD: Thank you, Hesione… The place may be Heartbreak House to you, Miss Dunn, and to this gentleman from the city who seems to have so little self-control; but to me it is only a very ill-regulated and rather untidy villa without any stables.
Which leads into a comic-nostalgic passage where they all mock themselves or each other:
HECTOR: Inhabited by—?
ELLIE: A crazy old sea captain and a young singer who adores him.
MRS HUSHABYE: A sluttish female, trying to stave off a double chin and an elderly spread, vainly wooing a born soldier of freedom.
MANGAN: A member of His Majesty’s Government that everybody sets down as a nincompoop: don’t forget him, Lady Utterword.
LADY UTTERWORD: And a very fascinating gentleman whose chief occupation is to be married to my sister.
HECTOR: All heartbroken imbeciles.
All of which is rejected by Mazzini (Ellie’s Dad), surely the nicest character:
MAZZINI: Oh no. Surely, if I may say so, rather a favourable specimen of what is best in our English culture. You are very charming people, most advanced, unprejudiced, frank, humane, unconventional, democratic, free-thinking, and everything that is delightful to thoughtful people.
Mangan starts crying that nobody realises he has a soul and likes poetry as well as money and Mrs Hushabye, who is inexplicably infatuated with him drags him off into the darkness. The atmosphere i.e. the dialogue, becomes more heavy with symbolism.
HECTOR [impatiently]: How is all this going to end?
MAZZINI: It won’t end, Mr Hushabye. Life doesn’t end: it goes on.
ELLIE: Oh, it can’t go on forever. I’m always expecting something. I don’t know what it is; but life must come to a point sometime.
Both Mazzini and Captain Shotover are given poetic speeches explaining how (Mazzini) all the politicking and meetings of his young adulthood ended up changing anything (Shotover) how, from the bridge of a ship the moon changes and the sea changes and the stars change but nothing really changes. Rather as in an Ibsen play, everyone repeats a key phrase, in this case ‘nothing happens’.
But the Captain develops his metaphor of the country, England, as a ship, a ship heading for the rocks, echoed by Hector wondering what we should do about ‘this ship that we are all in? This soul’s prison we call England?’
But while they’re talking about ships heading for rocks and captains asleep at the wheel there is a distant explosion and Nurse Guinness comes running in to say the rector’s house has been bombed. The house light had gone out, as the police ordered, but Hector perversely insists on going back in and turning it back on, bright as blazes.
Nurse Guinness says the police said to take shelter in the cellars but half the characters refuse to and at that moment the burglar, Bob Dunn, arrives to say the cellars are no good, where’s the quarry he’s heard about, he wants to take shelter in the cave.
Another explosion nearer this time. Captain Shotover says the next one will hit them and orders ‘Stand by, all hands, for judgment.’ Hector is insanely running round the house turning on all the lights and tearing down the curtains to make the place the maximum target for whoever’s doing the bombing.
Randall comes running in and pleads with Lady Underword to go to the cellars. What, with the staff, she replies and remains in her hammock. When hector strides in proud of his work but wishing the place was brighter Ellie insanely suggests setting the house on fire.
The droning overhead becomes louder and they all turn to look up into the skies. Hector tells Ellie to take cover but she refuses.
A terrific explosion shakes the earth. They reel back into their seats, or clutch the nearest support. They hear the falling of the shattered glass from the windows.
It was a direct hit on the gravel pit, itself full of dynamite, so there go Mangan and the burglar. Insanely Hector quips ‘One husband gone’ and then ‘Our turn next’. And they wait. And wait. But hear the droning of the planes diminishing and another explosion, but now in the distance. They are safe. It’s worth quoting the final lines in full to convey the full nihilistic madness of all the characters:
MRS HUSHABYE [relaxing her grip]: Oh! they have passed us.
LADY UTTERWORD: The danger is over, Randall. Go to bed.
CAPTAIN SHOTOVER: Turn in, all hands. The ship is safe. [He sits down and goes asleep].
ELLIE [disappointedly]: Safe!
HECTOR [disgustedly]: Yes, safe. And how damnably dull the world has become again suddenly! [he sits down].
MAZZINI [sitting down]: I was quite wrong, after all. It is we who have survived; and Mangan and the burglar –
HECTOR: – the two burglars –
LADY UTTERWORD: – the two practical men of business –
MAZZINI: – both gone. And the poor clergyman will have to get a new house.
MRS HUSHABYE: But what a glorious experience! I hope they’ll come again tomorrow night.
ELLIE [radiant at the prospect]: Oh, I hope so.
THE END.
Thoughts
I got the impression from the book’s blurb and skimmed summaries that at the end of the play the house was blown up with everyone inside, and this which would have been pleasing in an explosive and total way. However, Shaw’s actual ending is far more disturbing, leaving the audience with much the same feeling as the characters, who had all, secretly, been hoping for their silly lives, their pointless worries and their petty squabbles could just be wiped out and are left anticlimactic and disappointed…
The realisation that they’re not going to be blown up after all, and that they will have to resume the masks and roles they are so sick of, is far more harrowing. It’s a punch to the guts. For me, in this reading, it anticipated the grey nihilism of Samuel Beckett.
The mad house
The power of Captain Shotover’s house as a symbol is built up through multiple repetitions and redefinitions.
LADY UTTERWORD [sitting down with a flounce on the sofa]. I know what you must feel. Oh, this house, this house! I come back to it after twenty-three years; and it is just the same: the luggage lying on the steps, the servants spoilt and impossible, nobody at home to receive anybody, no regular meals, nobody ever hungry because they are always gnawing bread and butter or munching apples, and, what is worse, the same disorder in ideas, in talk, in feeling.
THE CAPTAIN [gloomily]. Youth! beauty! novelty! They are badly wanted in this house. I am excessively old. Hesione is only moderately young. Her children are not youthful.
LADY UTTERWORD. How can children be expected to be youthful in this house? Almost before we could speak we were filled with notions that might have been all very well for pagan philosophers of fifty, but were certainly quite unfit for respectable people of any age.
ELLIE [staring at her thoughtfully]. There’s something odd about this house, Hesione, and even about you. I don’t know why I’m talking to you so calmly. I have a horrible fear that my heart is broken, but that heartbreak is not like what I thought it must be.
MANGAN [feebly]. This is queer. I ought to walk out of this house.
THE GENTLEMAN. Thank you. One moment, Captain. [The captain halts and turns. The gentleman goes to him affably]. Do you happen to remember but probably you don’t, as it occurred many years ago— that your younger daughter married a numskull?
CAPTAIN SHOTOVER. Yes. She said she’d marry anybody to get away from this house.
MANGAN: In this house a man’s mind might as well be a football. I’m going. [He makes for the hall, but is stopped by a hail from the Captain, who has just emerged from his pantry].
CAPTAIN SHOTOVER. Whither away, Boss Mangan?
MANGAN. To hell out of this house: let that be enough for you and all here.
MANGAN [exasperated]. The very burglars can’t behave naturally in this house.
HECTOR. It is a pose like any other. In this house we know all the poses: our game is to find out the man under the pose. The man under your pose is apparently Ellie’s favourite, Othello.
RANDALL. Some of your games in this house are damned annoying, let me tell you.
HECTOR. Yes: I have been their victim for many years. I used to writhe under them at first; but I became accustomed to them. At last I learned to play them.
RANDALL. If it’s all the same to you I had rather you didn’t play them on me. You evidently don’t quite understand my character, or my notions of good form.
HECTOR [rising]. Something in the air of the house has upset you. It often does have that effect.
Through these multiple iterations, the house acquires a series of characters or associations, a kind of multi-faceted significance for both the characters and audience. I’m not sure it entirely lives up to Shaw’s stated aim of making it symbolise all of pre-war Edwardian society, but you can see what he’s aiming at.
Husbands and wives
The play is packed with paradoxical lines about husbands and wives and marriage, which are reminiscent of Oscar Wilde’s plays, saturated in one-liners on the subject. But then, as I pointed out when reviewing Wilde’s plays, the war between men and women, and jokes about husbands and wives, go back through Restoration comedy, back through Shakespeare, through Chaucer, back to the Classical world.
The inability of men and women to get on is one of the oldest subjects in literature, from married Helen running away with Paris and Eve disobeying God and her husband right up to the latest Hollywood movie all about marital infidelity or the endless traumas of the dating game.
I take a Darwinian view. I see the centrality and extraordinary longevity of this subject through all of recorded literature as demonstrating how finding and choosing a mate, building a nest, reproducing and raising young ones, is the single most important function in the lives of humans (or any other form of life come to that, mammals, birds etc).
What’s distinctive and impressive about humans is how terrible they are at it, how unhappy they make themselves because of it, and how it has remained a subject for mockery, satire or anger for millennia. And so the same hackneyed subject is reiterated here, again and again:
MANGAN: Well, I thought you were rather particular about people’s characters.
ELLIE: If we women were particular about men’s characters, we should never get married at all, Mr Mangan.
ELLIE [turning on her]: Splendid! Yes, splendid looking, of course. But how can you love a liar?
MRS HUSHABYE: I don’t know. But you can, fortunately. Otherwise there wouldn’t be much love in the world.
MANGAN [almost beside himself]: Do you think I’ll be made a convenience of like this?
ELLIE: Come, Mr Mangan! you made a business convenience of my father. Well, a woman’s business is marriage. Why shouldn’t I make a domestic convenience of you?
ELLIE: It is just because I want to save my soul that I am marrying for money. All the women who are not fools do.
ELLIE: Why do women always want other women’s husbands?
CAPTAIN SHOTOVER: Why do horse-thieves prefer a horse that is broken-in to one that is wild?
Or… these are conventions developed and streamlined in literature. These are literary tropes which have been with us since the dawn of writing because… why? Because it is a subject any writer can write humorously about and know his audience will get the joke, groan, cheer, laugh, whatever, but it requires little or no effort. Seen this way, maybe men-women and husband-wife gags are just easy.
Leonard Woolf
Inn her splendid biography of Leonard Woolf, Victoria Glendinning decribes Woolf being invited in June 1916 by Sidney and Beatrice Webb to go stay for a weekend at their house in Wyndham Croft in Sussex.
Leonard always found Shaw charming and friendly, ‘though if you happened to look into that slightly fishy, ice-blue eye of his, you got a shock’. He was never looking at you, or even speaking to you, personally. That blue eye ‘was looking through you or over you into a distant world or universe inhabited almost entirely by GBS, his thoughts and feelings, fancies and phantasies.’ That weekend contributed to the apocalyptic Shavian fantasies of his play Heartbreak House; Leonard remembered him writing it in the garden on a pad on his knee. (Leonard Woolf: A Life by Victorian Glendinning, 2007 edition, page 202)
Related links
Bernard Shaw reviews
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Posted by Simon on November 8, 2024
https://astrofella.wordpress.com/2024/11/08/heartbreak-house-george-bernard-shaw/