THE THEATRE.
" HEARTBREAK HOUSE " AT THE COURT THEATRE. Ix discussing the present production of Mr. Shaw's Heartbreak House, I propose to assume that neither I nor the reader had read the play when it was published a year or so ago, and to consider the acted play as a new piece of work making its effects upon fresh minds. So regarded, I must say that I personally found Mr. Shaw's "fantasia from the Russian" extremely im- pressive. I say personally advisedly, for the play is elusive and subtle to an extraordinary degree, and as it is by no means a complete or successful work of art, it is impossible to make very absolute or dogmatic statements about it. The play impressed me tremendously and gave me a sense of being in contact with a mind, not only intellectually acute, but capable of imparting "revelation." Nevertheless, I entirely see the point of view of any fellow auditor who was (a) puzzled, (b) bored or exasperated. Here, it seems to me, is the dis- advantage of Mr. Shaw's metaphysics and mysticism not being clothed in a successful art form. Through the play's aesthetic unsatisfactoriness, the chance of his message " getting through" to the reader, so to speak, is very much lessened, for it is the function of the arts to wing the messages that pass between one mind and another. Or if the reader prefers, in the peculiar content of the arts—a content which we have most of us agreed for the sake of brevity to call " beauty "—we find a common language by means of which one mind can speak with the other with some certainty of a meaning being apprehended.
One great sign of Mr. Shaw's strength in Heartbreak House is that in it, as in much of Back to Methuselah, he has cast aside his specious clarity. In most of his plays, intellectual or emotional difficulties and dilemmas are presented with a diagrammatic clearness which tho real dilemmas, that are the archetypes of Mr. Bernard Shaw's, do not possess. But in Heartbreak House he has by no means invariably thought it necessary to prune off the intricacies and amplitudes whidh his puzzles really possess. Ho has, in fact, to a great extent dropped his " told to the children " attitude. Perhaps it will make my meaning clear to the reader if I say that if he cares for ethics and metaphysics—and which of us does not 1—lie will probably feel Mr. Shaw's attitude in this play as a personal compliment to his own understanding.
The first act of the play is almost pure intellectual "knock- about." Mr. Shaw, we feel, has been wrestling with intangible entangling ideas until he has reached (as did Browning in his usually more courtly fashion) a kind of humorous despair and impatience over his problems. Very well, lee will go round and smash up the intellectual happy home There follows an act of incomparable intellectual somersaults, transformation scenes and a. general saying to the world of deeper considerations "go to blazes " ! The next act begins in the same -spirit, but Mr. Shaw cannot keep it up. Did it ever happen that the Pythoness at Delphi was reluctant to submit herself to the influence of the god 1—that she struggled impatiently with a sort of exasperation at being the mouthpiece of unwanted pro- fundities—and did the god wrestle with her and force her? And in her forced -submission to conveying his message of " Repent ye, repent," did she sometimes still rebel and still protest that he was pompous and self-important, and that she would live her own life, and did not care, and would " spoil his attitude " ? This is the sort of process that we seem to see going on in Heart- break House. Mr. Robert Graves somewhere, in a brief comment on his own poems, has said that ho believes many works of art are the outcome, so to speak, of a kind of duologue between two opposing impulses which are actuating the same person—Alice's playing croquet right hand against left, so to speak. Heartbreak House should confirm him in his opinion ; this is just the process of which we constantly feel conscious. Take, for example, e little piece of introspection in which the half-crazy old seer, Captain Shotover (this part was: quite admirably played by Mr. Brember Wills), has his methods dissected by Ellie Dunn, who tells him that all he does is to say something clever and then run away quickly before his hearers have had time to think of an answer. That is meant for much of Mr. Shaw's early work and is true. But to be plus royalisle que k roi, I cannot help feeling that Mr. Shaw-Shotover was right, and that when he wrote as he did the time had not come for Heartbreak House.
I think the play will remain to the end of time an exasperating one. In listening, we share the feelings of someone who should try to understand an important message delivered over the telephone by a man with a stutter. Again the reader will probably feel a great deal of sympathy with Mr. Shaw. It must be odious to have wanted to write a farce and to find that you had written a sermon. And yet bow immensely the two have improved one another, the sardonic and the emotional tones heightening and reinforcing one another. As for the production, I feel inclined to agree with my brother critics that it is not on the whole a good one. Miss Ellen O'Malley, for instance, does not make quite a success of the extremely difficult and subtle part of Ellie Dunn, while Miss Mary Grey is creditable, rather than inspired, as "lesions Hushabye. Mr. Alfred Clark's face is a tremendous asset to Boss Mangan, and Miss Edith Evans— that admirable actress—gives a remarkable performance as Lady Utterword, but I wish she would moderate her voice in the first act.. She has some very effective harsh notes in it which are extremely unpleasant and forcible, like a rasp, but these notes should be kept for very rare occasions. I suspect that all the rest of her audience are like me and have a slight sore throat this morning.
The pace has, I believe, been very much improved since the first night, but even now the whole action wants to be " slicker." Individuals too, Miss Mary Grey in particular, should pay less attention to their own effects and more to the ensemble.
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