Heartbreak House was published by Constable in 1919, though it had been written between 1913 and 1917 — during the war that the play implicitly prophesies. The first performance was in New York in 1920 (Shaw withheld it from the London stage until 1921). The play is Shaw’s most Chekhovian work, and he acknowledged the debt explicitly: the subtitle, “A Fantasia in the Russian Manner on English Themes,” declares its inheritance from The Cherry Orchard and Three Sisters.
The setting is a country house shaped like a ship — the home of Captain Shotover, an eighty-eight-year-old retired sea captain who spends his days inventing a death ray and his nights drinking rum. Into this house come the various representatives of educated England: Hector Hushabye, a compulsive liar and romantic; his wife Hesione, who collects interesting people; Ellie Dunn, a young woman about to make a mercenary marriage; Boss Mangan, a captain of industry who turns out to be penniless; and Lady Utterword, Shotover’s other daughter, who represents the world of imperial administration.
They talk brilliantly — Shavian conversation at its most dazzling — but they cannot act. They see the approaching catastrophe (the war, which arrives in the form of a bombing raid at the play’s end) but are paralyzed by their own sophistication. They understand everything and can do nothing. The conversation circles without resolution; relationships form and dissolve without consequence; and the play builds to a climax that is simultaneously comic (Boss Mangan is killed by a bomb while hiding in the gravel pit) and apocalyptic.
Shaw wrote the play as a response to the war, but he set it before the war — showing the world that produced the catastrophe rather than the catastrophe itself. His target is not militarism or politics but culture: the educated English classes who were too clever, too comfortable, and too disillusioned to prevent the destruction of their civilization. Heartbreak House is Europe — the house of the cultivated, cosmopolitan bourgeoisie — and its destruction is the play’s final image.
Collecting Heartbreak House
First edition (Constable, London, 1919): Published in the volume Heartbreak House, Great Catherine, and Playlets of the War. Green cloth.
Market values:
- First edition (combined volume): $60–$200
- Later separate editions: $10–$25