Heartbreak House Review

Heartbreak House

Festival Theatre, Chichester

To start off, this was the first time I saw a George Bernard Shaw play. I have seen My Fair Lady twice and it is a favourite musical of mine. This was also an opportunity to see Derek Jacobi, whose King Lear I regard as one of the best Shakespearean performances I have ever seen.

During the first year of World War I, Ellie Dunn (Fiona Button), her father, Mazzini Dunn (Ronald Pickup), and her fiance, Hector Hushabye (Raymond Coulthard), are invited to stay at Captain Shotover's (Derek Jacobi) house by his daughter, Hesione Hushabye (Emma Fielding), a friend of Ellie's. However things are not what they seem as hearts are broken and engagements start to unravel.

This is as much of the story as I can tell, because it is quite a challenge to understand it. I mentioned before that I am not a fan of Charles Dickens' wordy style, and now I find that Shaw's style in this play is the wordiest of the wordy. At first I understood that the play was following a household of pleasure-seeking members of the upper classes. However the use of grandiose words soon took over, and as deceptions were revealed and characters delved into each others' matters, I began to question what the characters were talking about in the first place. I even had to remind myself on several occasions what heartbreaking, which (apparently) was one of the leading themes of the play, meant.

It does not help that the characters felt a bit one dimensional. Most of them were in a world of their own within this setting of pleasure and there was little character development. I did not even care what happened to them when a zeppelin appeared near the end, a slight reference to the looming tragedy of WWI that Shaw uses to show how oblivious the characters were to the outside world.

The best aspect of this production are the actors, no matter how thinly drawn their characters were. Emma Fielding simpers with self-satisfaction as Hesione patronised certain characters. I was most confused by Ellie Dunn's story arc; she seemed at first to be taken aback by the lighthearted atmosphere of the household, but soon became as self-absorbed as the rest of the characters. Yet Fiona Button did well in playing this young and innocent character. Sara Stewart played Lady Utterwood like a child in her own little world. Raymond Coulthard played a sportsmanlike Hector Hushabye, and gave the only applauded moment in the production when he quickly covers up a savage mock fencing match with some press ups in front of Shotover

Captain Shotover was the highlight of the production, and I am not just saying that because Derek Jacobi is playing the role. Amongst all the conversations that was going on I preferred his perspective, no matter how strange or off-topic his comments were. By giving an innocent yet delusional take on the role, Jacobi gave a great performance.

Apparently the house that the play is set in is meant to allude to a ship without a rudder that contains different members of society. If that is the case then apart from the occasional nautical object and Shotover's commands as though he is still on a ship, there is little to suggest this theme. Otherwise I liked how the production showed that the characters were in their world of fantasy by occasionally using dreamlike music as characters would appear and disappear mysteriously outside the windows.

I may not be the right person to say whether this is a good George Bernard Shaw play or not, but as a beginner to his plays I can definitely say that this is not a good introduction. Derek Jacobi is really the saving grace of this production, but unless you can understand the most complex of conversations this is only worth seeing at a Restricted View.