CULTURE & COMEDY

Shaw's Heartbreak House
A Witty Diatribe, Dumb-Wrong As Ever

A witty and dumb-wrong as ever Shaw diatribe has come around once again, in this instance, Heartbreak House, a Chekhovian riff in which Shaw presents his pontifications through paper-thin characters about everything he believes that very few of his credible contemporaries in the British Empire agreed with, in this case, the coming demise of the happy and hopeless upper class.

Here we have a typical Shavian loudmouth, in the person of the elderly Captain Shotover, as played by the always enjoyable Shaw interpreter, Philip Bosco, canting away about the woes of and alluding to the remedies for society, while a slightly amusing love mismatch is concocted to sugar the speechifying.

It seems that Ellie, a lass as likable as Shaw could manage to create, may actually commit the egregious crime of marrying an irredeemable businessman, named Boss Mangan, who, like everybody else in Shaw, is a cartoon character meant to signify the author’s disapproval or approval of one aspect of society or another, in this case, his disdain for all things entrepreneurial.

But a female friend, Hesione, dissuades her, at which point Ellie chooses as the object of her love none other than Hesione’s husband.

Foiled, the young lady seems to resolve to do her worst and marry Boss Mangan.

There is the occasional touching line, such as the lament of the young woman’s female advisor, “I am just wondering how much longer I can stand living in this cruel, damnable world.”

But we must also abide Shaw referring to all businessmen as “those hogs to whom the universe is nothing but a machine for greasing their bristles and filling their snouts.”

Notice, however, how well nations without businessmen are able to feed and clothe themselves.

Part of Shotover’s program is bombing the human race, and, as expected, toward the end of the political tract, the bombs begin to fall, as Shaw seeks to wake up his lethargic society, which he is convinced is uncaringly drifting toward destruction. World War I was just around the corner, but one can hardly blame the mistaken policies of the Kaiser on the lassitude of the British upper class.

While we always enjoy Shaw’s wit and tolerate his scandalously shallow knowledge of traditional philosophy, other than the shaky concepts he improvises for his own ends, he seldom lets us forget that he was what was then referred to as a Fabian socialist.

His attendant convictions make him one of the most preposterously unaware independent thinkers to advocate a system that, if it had truly taken hold, would no doubt have selected him to be among the first who would be commanded to shut his mouth or expect to be sent off to the Lake District, where he could finish his days, contemplating the hills and waters that once nourished the relatively placid Wordsworth, the poet of “natural piety,” a locale that would have proved to be hell on earth for a theatrical firebrand known for his incendiary impiety.

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