"...a magnificent performance"

George Bernard Shaw’s Heartbreak House is his most magnificent play and is being given a magnificent performance at the Berkshire Theatre Festival.

It is atypical Shaw, his most sensitive and compassionate. He called it Chekhovian and to an extent, it is, in its ensemble playing by a large but tightly knit cast in which each character, regardless of the size of his role, is important. But it is much more Shavian, full of rapid fire dialog, unexpected plot twists and, above all, comedy that reaches the level of farce but never slips into it.

The plot deals with leisured Europe before WWI, and when Shaw began writing it, not a shot had been fired. He withheld the play, compassionate for the young dying in a war he felt wrong and unnecessary, until 1920 when he finally let it be published and, a year later, performed.

The action takes place in the country home of Captain Shotover, a long-retired sea captain and slightly mad poet, who is reluctantly hosting a weekend house party for invited and uninvited guests. His two daughters could provide a plot in themselves: Hesione, who lives there with her husband Hector, and Ariadne, who suddenly reappears from twenty years in India with her love-smitten brother-in-law in pursuit.

But there are invited guests as well, though the charming but at times vague Hesione, has almost forgotten to be there to greet them. Ellie Dunn, the ingénue and heroine, is expected, if not greeted, followed shortly by the arrival of her father, Mazzini Dunn, and Boss Mangan, the portly, rich businessman, whom Ellie is, against the dictates her heart, considering marrying

And all of them, are totally engaging and endearing (even the supposed villain, Boss Mangan) in a play that is so delightful it seems much shorter than its running time.

Director Anders Cato has caught the exactly right tone, rhythm, and pace for this play. Although he has made substantial cuts in Shaw’s over-long script, they are so seamless that one would have to consult the text to detect them. The play runs smoothly, seemingly effortlessly, along its seemingly casual, unaware track.

Hearts are indeed broken and life would seem to just go on as it has, but, this being Shaw, war does hang in the future, and for a few brilliant moments near the play’s end, the mood will shift as the self-centered characters began to be almost glad to have been startled out of their idle self absorption into a reality Shaw regretted they had to face.

The miracle of this play, which Shaw himself admitted was one of the most difficult for him to write, is that it can have all the charm, humor, and entertainment a Shaw play always brings, can contain a social message which Shaw’s soap-box heart loved, (though in this play he has left most of that in the long preface to the published play), but it brings to the stage such an incredible cast of delightful characters that every minute is sheer joy.

This production is extremely well cast. Marin Hinkle, as Hesione Hushabye, is sinuous, charming, capable of the compassion her surname implies, capable of saying to the heartbroken Ellie, in love with Hesione’s husband, “I would give him to you if I could.” She is also capable of reducing Boss Mangan to tears and then consoling him. She has been too languid to leave Heartbreak House in which she lives, but she accepts potential ruin with the grace that flows from her every movement on stage, her every interplay with the other characters.

Her sister Ariadne Utterwood (Sarah Knowlton) believes she has left Heartbreak House behind her when years ago she married and moved to India; however once home again, she can condemn the house for lacking stables and horses but weep when she fears she has no heart to break. She plays her role with panache and is marvelous in a scene in which she reduces her adoring follower, Randall, to not mere tears, but to cry-baby bawling. She too is languid, elegant, and self-assured. An excellent example of the Chekovian "smaller role" character achieving major importance.

Sarah Drew’s Ellie Dunn is pivotal. She is the heroine, the charming ingénue, whose heart must really be broken in this play. Although she is romantically tied to the charming Hector, whom she has met elsewhere under another name, during the play she grows, changes, develops. It is she who has been given the beautiful lines, “When your heart is broken, your boats are burned: nothing matters anymore. It is the end of happiness and the beginning of peace.” They are spoken quietly and immediately the mad pace of the play is taken up again. But it is a pivotal moment and director Cato has placed it strategically and movingly and let its mood last just long enough.

But it is not just the women characters who bless this play with great performances. Captain Shotover weaves through the play with believable grace and humor. John Horton gives him just the right emphasis, the right touch of aging eccentricity, and with it the lovable pretended amnesia the character demands.

Hector Hushabye (Garret Dillahunt) wears the most dashing of the wonderful costumes and is entirely convincing as the idle but bored husband of Hesione who must invent other believed characters and romances to cover the emptiness of his life in Heartbreak House from which his every action shows he wants out but has, he thinks, no place to go. He is well cast and every inch Hector — dashing, posing, delivering his lines and actions with agility and grace.

Allyn Burrows as Randall and Patrick Husted as Mazzini Dunn have smaller roles but, as played, in no way lesser ones. Both make magic of every moment they are on stage. Randall is a crybaby but on demand can keep the home fires burning, and Mazzini is touchingly Ellie’s father when he explains his non-response to Hesione’s feminine charms by citing the great love between him and his wife which thus produced such a charming daughter. In the anything-goes atmosphere of Heartbreak House, he can feel unembarrassed to appear in his pajamas, and Randall can take his stage call in his underpants.

And then there is Boss Mangan, Shaw’s villain but a sheer delight. His ultra-long speeches in the script have been streamlined into wonderful bombast, and he is perhaps, villain though he should be, a character many in the audience will love most. His physical girth is enormous and his delivery at times bombastic, yet he too can be brought to tears by Hermione, and behind his seeming appearance there lurks the man he knows he really is - the only character too fearful to accept the future.

The two admirable sets, rich in detail, have been provided by Jeff Cowie, the delightful period costumes by Olivera Gajic.

This is thoroughly lovely play, not often enough produced, and suddenly available on our doorstep in a production that word-of-mouth should set the phones ringing. I predict it will easily make the ten-best lists in the Berkshires at the summer’s end. At the moment it is at the top of my list.