THE BERNARD SHAW LIBRARY

HEARTBREAK HOUSE

‘He did his best in redressing the fateful unbalance between truth and reality, in lifting mankind to a higher rung of social maturity. He often pointed a scornful finger at human frailty, but his jests were never at the expense of humanity’ Thomas Mann

‘Shaw will not allow complacency; he hates second-hand opinions; he attacks fashion; he continually challenges and unsettles, questioning and provoking us even when he is making us laugh. And he is still at it. No cliché or truism of contemporary life is safe from him’ Michael Holroyd

‘In his works Shaw left us his mind… Today we have no Shavian wizard to awaken us with clarity and paradox, and the loss to our national intelligence is immense’ John Carey, Sunday Times

‘An important writer and an interesting socialist and critic… Thank God he lived’ Peter Levi, Independent

‘He was a Tolstoy with jokes, a modern Dr Johnson, a universal genius who on his own modest reckoning put even Shakespeare in the shade’ John Campbell, Independent

‘His plays were superb exercises in high-level argument on every issue under the sun, from feminism and God, to war and eternity, but they were also hits – and still are’ Paul Johnson, Daily Mail

BERNARD SHAW was born in Dublin in 1856. Although essentially shy, he created the persona of G.B.S., the showman, satirist, controversialist, critic, pundit, wit, intellectual buffoon and dramatist. Commentators brought a new adjective into English: Shavian, a term used to embody all his brilliant qualities.

After his arrival in London in 1876 he became an active Socialist and a brilliant platform speaker. He wrote on many social aspects of the day: on Common Sense about the War (1914), How to Settle the Irish Question (1917) and The Intelligent Woman’s Guide to Socialism and Capitalism (1928), published by Penguin. He undertook his own education at the British Museum and consequently became keenly interested in cultural subjects. Thus his prolific output included music, art and theatre reviews, which were collected into several volumes, such as Music In London 1890–1894 (3 vols., 1931) Pen Portraits and Reviews (1931); and Our Theatres in the Nineties (3 vols., 1931). He also wrote five novels, including Cashel Byron’s Profession, and a collection of shorter works issued as Black Girl in Search of God and Some Lesser Tales (also in Penguin).

Shaw conducted a strong attack on the London Theatre and was closely associated with the intellectual revival of British Theatre. His many plays (the full canon runs to 52) fall into several categories: ‘Plays Pleasant’; ‘Plays Unpleasant’; ‘Plays for Puritans’; political plays; chronicle plays; ‘metabiological Pentateuch’ (Back to Methuselah), in five plays; extravaganzas; romances; and fables. He died in 1950.

DAVID HARE is a playwright and director. Between 1978 and 1997 the National Theatre produced eleven of his plays consecutively. Nine of his best-known works, including Plenty, The Secret Rapture, Racing Demon, Skylight, The Judas Kiss, Amy’s View, The Blue Room and Via Dolorosa have also been presented on Broadway.

DAN H. LAURENCE, editor of Shaw’s Collected Letters, his Collected Plays with their Prefaces, Shaw’s Music and (with Daniel Leary) The Complete Prefaces, was Literary Adviser to the Shaw Estate until his retirement in 1990. He is Series Editor for the works of Shaw in Penguin.

INTRODUCTION

In the confident days of post-war expansion, most British theatre companies were able to rotate the same classic authors to make up a dependable repertoire of plays which someone once wittily christened ‘brochure theatre’. At your local playhouse you could expect to see Shakespeare performed alongside a regular team of authors who usually included Harold Pinter, Ibsen and Arthur Miller. But, more recently, as regional theatres have suffered disastrously from public underfunding and as the comfortable literary consensus which underpinned their choices has disappeared, so artistic directors have needed to adopt a bolder and more improvised approach to creating a modern repertory. Some famous writers have continued to thrive. Anton Chekhov’s four best-known plays are still relentlessly revived. Oscar Wilde’s work seems only to grow in popularity. But the most eminent victim of this enforced shake-down has been the problematic figure of George Bernard Shaw. Sometimes it is as if we no longer quite know what to do with him.

On the publication of the final volume of Michael Holroyd’s brilliant three-part biography in 1992, then several reviewers noted how unfortunate it was that the fifteen years it had taken Holroyd to write the book had coincided with the irreversible decline in his subject’s reputation. It would be hard, they insisted, to imagine a playwright more thoroughly out of fashion. Shaw, for all his staggering longevity and range, was, even by the time of his death in 1950, still associated with an era of rational Fabianism which no longer spoke to the modern world. His brand of pioneering socialism no longer spoke to a civilization grazing contentedly on the excesses of the free market. Moreover, his plays with their notorious long sentences and stagey attitudinizing implicitly embodied a fearful approach to sex which our own more full-blooded age found spinsterish and immature. The characters were authorial mouthpieces – puppets, not people. The playwright once described as ‘the creator of modern consciousness’ seemed, in the way of many things new, to have become a victim of the fact that he had so completely dominated his own time. He had, in short, been superseded.

If these reviewers had looked a little harder, they would have found their supposed reassessments of Shaw more truly reflected the doubts which some audiences and critics had enjoyed about his work from the beginning. The character of Shaw himself had always commanded an interest and authority far wider than any of the plays he actually wrote. As a man, he was offered one million dollars on his deathbed to impart a last message to an American news magazine. That was a measure of his extraordinary celebrity. (He declined.) But as a playwright, he was well used to being singled out for special abuse. When, in 1977, the critic of the Guardian, Michael Billington, casually referred to Shaw as ‘the greatest British dramatist since Shakespeare’, then John Osborne, at that time one of our leading British playwrights, unleashed an extraordinary attack on his dead colleague, accusing Billington of suffering ‘a critical brainstorm, as well as perpetuating an exam-crazy classroom myth. Shaw is the most fraudulent inept writer of Victorian melodramas ever to gull a timid critic or fool a dull public. He writes like a Pakistani who has learned English when he was twelve years old in order to become a chartered accountant. From childhood, I have read these plays, toured as an actor and stage manager in them on one night stands. Apart from this experience, any writer I know could put his finger on the crass, vulgar drivel in any of them… Try learning them, Mr Billington: they are posturing wind and rubbish. In short, just the kind of play you would expect a critic to write. The difference is simply: he did it.’

It is clear that any playwright who attracts this kind of impassioned censure from one of his most distinguished successors is not just suffering a temporary dip in reputation. He is, I suggest, attempting a kind of play so crazily ambitious that some people are bound to object even to the very endeavour. A playwright who makes remarks like ‘You see things and say “why” but I dream things and I say “why not”’ is always going to divide people. Some will find him inspiring. But others will think him pretentious. For if Heartbreak House is, as its author suggested, his Lear, then it has to be admitted that it has, from its first presentation, suffered a far more mixed press than Shakespeare’s accepted masterpiece.

Billed, perhaps misleadingly, as a fantasia in the Russian manner on English themes, Heartbreak House played at the Royal Court in Shaw’s own 1921 production at over four hours. Shaw was perhaps pushing his luck when he tried to make light of this: ‘Yes it is a long play, a frightfully long play. If the spectators interrupt and delay the proceedings in the usual manner they will spoil the performance, and they will not be out of the theatre until three in the morning. We shall get through in time for the last trains if they will let us; if not, let them pay for taxis or walk home; and serve them right.’ Shaw seems not to have been very surprised when the play then attracted a level of dismissive vituperation which not even his recent detractors could hope to emulate.

From the outset, then, Shaw’s occasionally unwieldy attempt to mix high farce with prophesy and with divine tragedy, and to marble an apparent comedy of manners with grave presentiments of impending catastrophe, have brought out an anger and exasperation in some spectators which has never truly abated. Yet for some of us, Heartbreak House remains not just, alongside Pygmalion, Shaw’s most likeable and profound play, but also a work which has extraordinary historic importance.

Heartbreak House is frequently revived and much admired by working actors and directors precisely because it is the century’s original state-of-England play. If anything has distinguished the British theatre in the last hundred years it has been its continual and refreshing willingness to make art not just from private subjects (grief, love, family, jealousy) but also from public issues. In particular it is the theatre which has sought to dramatize the peculiar and tragic national trajectory of the period. If the theatre has seemed in this period to be the most adult of all British literary forms, then it is surely because it has not been frightened to stray into areas of social structure and public policy. It is this genre of play, originated by Heartbreak House and since pioneered by dozens of writers, including Harley Granville Barker, J. B. Priestley and indeed John Osborne himself, which has given twentieth century British drama so much zip, and which has led to the international conviction, still largely valid, that the theatre, alongside painting, is the one of the two art forms at which the British truly excel.

In gathering together a collection of Bloomsbury-like Bohemians in a Sussex house, the play sets off in a now-familiar Chekhovian direction, analysing the state of the nation and its dangerous indifference to its own fate by portraying the life and loves of a representative group of middle-class people. Shaw looks ahead to the coming century and sees it as no friendly place for romantics or adventurers but belonging instead to a new class of depressing capitalists who are determined to reduce life to its lowest common denominator. Who can say he was wrong? Yet even in this overall scheme, so uncannily prophetic about the world we now live in – Captain Shotover, let it be noted, is working on Ronald Reagan’s Star Wars strategy, the weapon which will destroy all other weapons – there is a wildness of texture, a sheer strangeness of vision which is often so personal and peculiar that we may almost rub our ears in danger of disbelieving what we have heard.

Many commentators have rightly drawn attention to the zaniness of Shaw’s humour. ‘It should be clear by now’ says Bertolt Brecht ‘that Shaw is a terrorist. The Shavian terror is an unusual one and he employs an unusual weapon – that of humour.’ Shaw’s playfulness with the form of theatre itself is taken to prefigure the arrival of absurdists like Beckett and lonesco. But less noticed, it seems, is Shaw’s underlying steel. Under the surface of the whole enterprise lies the extraordinary contention that it is not anyone’s business to try and be happy; that happiness may only be a failure and lure. Nothing in the play is more moving than Captain Shotover’s reluctance to give way to what he calls ‘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.’

Using a method which is notably Brechtian – strong characters turn out to be weak, rich characters turn out to be poor – Shaw explains with remorseless clarity how easily the wish to enjoy life turns into a hopeless infatuation with dreams. He shows how each of us drifts off from the world into which we are born to dream far too easily of a world in which things might be different.

No wonder this uncomfortable portrait of a society in which people are habitually distracted from their better purposes is one which theatregoers have occasionally found hard to contemplate. But they have also not been helped by a common view of the play which emphasizes its frivolity and rhetoric at the expense of its deeper feelings. When I was fortunate enough to direct the play at the Almeida Theatre in London in 1997, with a cast which included Penelope Wilton, Richard Griffiths, Peter McEnery, Emma Fielding and Patricia Hodge, it became clear that, far from the governing tone of the play being either light-hearted or elegiac, it is, on the contrary, full of the feverishness of a genuine despair. My dazzling ensemble revealed that underneath the banter, underneath the central story of a young girl growing up in the course of a single evening, there lay a sense of wasted passion which belies Shaw’s reputation as a cold or cerebral writer.

‘It has more of the miracle, more of the mystic belief in it than any of my others’ wrote the author of his own favourite play. It also, he might have added, has more of the heart.

HEARTBREAK HOUSE

CONTENTS

HEARTBREAK HOUSE AND HORSEBACK HALL

Where Heartbreak House Stands

The Inhabitants

Horseback Hall

Revolution on the Shelf

The Cherry Orchard

Nature’s Long Credits

The Wicked Half Century

Hypochondria

Those Who do not Know how to Live must Make a Merit of Dying

War Delirium

Madness in Court

The Long Arm of War

The Rabid Watchdogs of Liberty

The Sufferings of the Sane

Evil in the Throne of Good

Straining at the Gnat and Swallowing the Camel

Little Minds and Big Battles

The Dumb Capables and the Noisy Incapables

The Practical Business Men

How the Fools Shouted the Wise Men Down

The Mad Election

The Yahoo and the Angry Ape

Plague on Both your Houses!

How the Theatre Fared

The Soldier at the Theatre Front

Commerce in the Theatre

Unser Shakespear

The Higher Drama put out of Action

Church and Theatre

The Next Phase

The Ephemeral Thrones and the Eternal Theatre

How War Muzzles the Dramatic Poet

HEARTBREAK HOUSE AND HORSEBACK HALL

WHERE HEARTBREAK HOUSE STANDS

HEARTBREAK HOUSE is not merely the name of the play which follows this preface. It is cultured, leisured Europe before the war. When the play was begun not a shot had been fired; and only the professional diplomatists and the very few amateurs whose hobby is foreign policy even knew that the guns were loaded. A Russian playwright, Tchekov, had produced four fascinating dramatic studies of Heartbreak House, of which three, The Cherry Orchard, Uncle Vanya, and The Seagull, had been performed in England. Tolstoy, in his Fruits of Enlightenment, had shewn us through it in his most ferociously contemptuous manner. Tolstoy did not waste any sympathy on it: it was to him the house in which Europe was stifling its soul; and he knew that our utter enervation and futilization in that overheated drawing-room atmosphere was delivering the world over to the control of ignorant and soulless cunning and energy, with the frightful consequences which have now overtaken it. Tolstoy was no pessimist: he was not disposed to leave the house standing if he could bring it down about the ears of its pretty and amiable voluptuaries; and he wielded the pickaxe with a will. He treated the case of the inmates as one of opium poisoning, to be dealt with by seizing the patients roughly and exercising them violently until they were broad awake. Tchekov, more of a fatalist, had no faith in these charming people extricating themselves. They would, he thought, be sold up and sent adrift by the bailiffs; therefore he had no scruple in exploiting and even flattering their charm.

THE INHABITANTS

Tchekov’s plays, being less lucrative than swings and roundabouts, got no further in England, where theatres are only ordinary commercial affairs, than a couple of performances by the Stage Society. We stared and said, ‘How Russian!’ They did not strike me in that way. Just as Ibsen’s intensely Norwegian plays exactly fitted every middle and professional class suburb in Europe, these intensely Russian plays fitted all the country houses in Europe in which the pleasures of music, art, literature, and the theatre had supplanted hunting, shooting, fishing, flirting, eating and drinking. The same nice people, the same utter futility. The nice people could read; some of them could write; and they were the only repositories of culture who had social opportunities of contact with our politicians, administrators, and newspaper proprietors, or any chance of sharing or influencing their activities. But they shrank from that contact. They hated politics. They did not wish to realize Utopia for the common people: they wished to realize their favorite fictions and poems in their own lives; and, when they could, they lived without scruple on incomes which they did nothing to earn. The women in their girlhood made themselves look like variety theatre stars, and settled down later into the types of beauty imagined by the previous generation of painters. They took the only part of our society in which there was leisure for high culture, and made it an economic, political, and, as far as practicable, a moral vacuum; and as Nature, abhorring the vacuum, immediately filled it up with sex and with all sorts of refined pleasures, it was a very delightful place at its best for moments of relaxation. In other moments it was disastrous. For prime ministers and their like, it was a veritable Capua.

HORSEBACK HALL

But where were our front benchers to nest if not here? The alternative to Heartbreak House was Horseback Hall, consisting of a prison for horses with an annex for the ladies and gentlemen who rode them, hunted them, talked about them, bought them and sold them, and gave nine-tenths of their lives to them, dividing the other tenth between charity, churchgoing (as a substitute for religion), and conservative electioneering (as a substitute for politics). It is true that the two establishments got mixed at the edges. Exiles from the library, the music room, and the picture gallery would be found languishing among the stables, miserably discontented; and hardy horsewomen who slept at the first chord of Schumann were born, horribly misplaced, into the garden of Klingsor; but sometimes one came upon horsebreakers and heartbreakers who could make the best of both worlds. As a rule, however, the two were apart and knew little of one another; so the prime minister folk had to choose between barbarism and Capua. And of the two atmospheres it is hard to say which was the more fatal to statesmanship.

REVOLUTION ON THE SHELF

Heartbreak House was quite familiar with revolutionary ideas on paper. It aimed at being advanced and freethinking, and hardly ever went to church or kept the Sabbath except by a little extra fun at week-ends. When you spent a Friday to Tuesday in it you found on the shelf in your bedroom not only the books of poets and novelists, but of revolutionary biologists and even economists. Without at least a few plays by myself and Mr Granville Barker, and a few stories by Mr H. G. Wells, Mr Arnold Bennett, and Mr John Galsworthy, the house would have been out of the movement. You would find Blake among the poets, and beside him Bergson, Butler, Scott Haldane, the poems of Meredith and Thomas Hardy, and, generally speaking, all the literary implements for forming the mind of the perfect modern Socialist and Creative Evolutionist. It was a curious experience to spend Sunday in dipping into these books, and on Monday morning to read in the daily paper that the country had just been brought to the verge of anarchy because a new Home Secretary or chief of police, without an idea in his head that his great-grandmother might not have had to apologize for, had refused to ‘recognize’ some powerful Trade Union, just as a gondola might refuse to recognize a 20,000-ton liner.

In short, power and culture were in separate compartments. The barbarians were not only literally in the saddle, but on the front bench in the House of Commons, with nobody to correct their incredible ignorance of modern thought and political science but upstarts from the counting-house, who had spent their lives furnishing their pockets instead of their minds. Both, however, were practised in dealing with money and with men, as far as acquiring the one and exploiting the other went; and although this is as undesirable an expertness as that of the medieval robber baron, it qualifies men to keep an estate or a business going in its old routine without necessarily understanding it, just as Bond Street tradesmen and domestic servants keep fashionable society going without any instruction in sociology.

THE CHERRY ORCHARD

The Heartbreak people neither could nor would do anything of the sort. With their heads as full of the Anticipations of Mr H. G. Wells as the heads of our actual rulers were empty even of the anticipations of Erasmus or Sir Thomas More, they refused the drudgery of politics, and would have made a very poor job of it if they had changed their minds. Not that they would have been allowed to meddle anyhow, as only through the accident of being a hereditary peer can anyone in these days of Votes for Everybody get into parliament if handicapped by a serious modern cultural equipment; but if they had, their habit of living in a vacuum would have left them helpless and ineffective in public affairs. Even in private life they were often helpless wasters of their inheritance, like the people in Tchekov’s Cherry Orchard. Even those who lived within their incomes were really kept going by their solicitors and agents, being unable to manage an estate or run a business without continual prompting from those who have to learn how to do such things or starve.

From what is called Democracy no corrective to this state of things could be hoped. It is said that every people has the Government it deserves. It is more to the point that every Government has the electorate it deserves; for the orators of the front bench can edify or debauch an ignorant electorate at will. Thus our democracy moves in a vicious circle of reciprocal worthiness and unworthiness.

NATURE’S LONG CREDITS

Nature’s way of dealing with unhealthy conditions is unfortunately not one that compels us to conduct a solvent hygiene on a cash basis. She demoralizes us with long credits and reckless overdrafts, and then pulls us up cruelly with catastrophic bankruptcies. Take, for example, common domestic sanitation. A whole city generation may neglect it utterly and scandalously, if not with absolute impunity, yet without any evil consequences that anyone thinks of tracing to it. In a hospital two generations of medical students may tolerate dirt and carelessness, and then go out into general practice to spread the doctrine that fresh air is a fad, and sanitation an imposture set up to make profits for plumbers. Then suddenly Nature takes her revenge. She strikes at the city with a pestilence and at the hospital with an epidemic of hospital gangrene, slaughtering right and left until the innocent young have paid for the guilty old, and the account is balanced. And then she goes to sleep again and gives another period of credit, with the same result.

This is what has just happened in our political hygiene. Political science has been as recklessly neglected by Governments and electorates during my lifetime as sanitary science was in the days of Charles the Second. In international relations diplomacy has been a boyishly lawless affair of family intrigues, commercial and territorial brigandage, torpors of pseudo-goodnature produced by laziness, and spasms of ferocious activity produced by terror. But in these islands we muddled through. Nature gave us a longer credit than she gave to France or Germany or Russia. To British centenarians who died in their beds in 1914, any dread of having to hide underground in London from the shells of an enemy seemed more remote and fantastic than a dread of the appearance of a colony of cobras and rattlesnakes in Kensington Gardens. In the prophetic works of Charles Dickens we were warned against many evils which have since come to pass; but of the evil of being slaughtered by a foreign foe on our own doorsteps there was no shadow. Nature gave us a very long credit; and we abused it to the utmost. But when she struck at last she struck with a vengeance. For four years she smote our firstborn and heaped on us plagues of which Egypt never dreamed. They were all as preventible as the great Plague of London, and came solely because they had not been prevented. They were not undone by winning the war. The earth is still bursting with the dead bodies of the victors.

THE WICKED HALF CENTURY

It is difficult to say whether indifference and neglect are worse than false doctrine; but Heartbreak House and Horseback Hall unfortunately suffered from both. For half a century before the war civilization had been going to the devil very precipitately under the influence of a pseudo-science