Heartbreak House has always had its advocates as one of Shaw's most important plays. Certainly Shaw himself meant it to be important. A formidably long work, it had to do, Shaw announced, with "cultured, leisured Europe" before World War I: it was to be a sort of Shavian Cherry Orchard. Thus frankly symbolic, it portrays the kind of people, the ways of living and the states of mind that helped produce the 1914 war. Into the ship-shaped house of an aged English sea captain (Maurice Evans), himself the voice of a more high-mettled era, there troop, like creatures into the Ark,...
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