Rushen Players

Heartbreak House

by George Bernard Shaw
NOVEMBER 2025
Thursday 20th to Saturday 22nd: Curtain 7:30pm
Erin Arts Centre, Port Erin
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These notes are to provide a little more background information to the play
than we are able to fit in the paper programme

Director’s Notes

Welcome to the Rushen Players’ production of Heartbreak House

The Playwright:

George Bernard Shaw was born in Dublin in 1856 into a poor family and began working as a clerk aged 15.
At the age of 20, he moved to London and educated himself by attending debates and lectures at the British Museum.
He became a journalist and theatre critic, believing that art had a purpose beyond the aesthetic to educate and to make society better.
He became a socialist and started writing tracts as well as drama criticism.
Determined to develop a new variety of play to address social issues, he started to write his own plays in the 1890s
and during the first decades of the 1900s he produced some of his most famous works, including
Pygmalion, Major Barbara, Saint Joan and Heartbreak House.

His plays were controversial, ridiculing and challenging traditional views including gender roles,
as he in turn outraged and delighted audiences.
His talent as a writer was, however, never in doubt, and he was awarded the Nobel Prize in 1925.

The Play:

Heartbreak House is subtitled ‘A Fantasia in the Russian Manner on English Themes’ and is heavily influenced by
the works of Anton Chekhov, in particular The Cherry Orchard.
Like Chekhov’s play, it focuses on a family on the eve of profound social change,
when the old rules of class and social rank were being challenged, not least by the outbreak of war.

Shaw presents the clashes between idealism and pragmatism, lethargy and action.
His characters are preoccupied with romances and personal concerns, seemingly at arm’s length from
the destructive reality of the time they live in.
Shaw writes in his preface that Heartbreak House ‘is not merely the name of the play….It is cultured, leisured Europe before the War.’

In the topsy-turvy world of the play, the characters and audience are at sea in a house/ship where marriage
does not imply love or fidelity and war is an entertaining spectacle.

Shaw, like Chekhov, tackles his themes through comedy, creating larger than life characters whose
foibles and personalities lead to hilarious conversations and confusing situations.

If Shaw is setting out to educate his audience, he does it, at least most of the time, with a light touch,
so that the play’s moral is sweetened with humour and charm.

Reception, Productions and Adaptations:

Of all his plays, Shaw considered Heartbreak House his masterpiece.
While initial criticism was harsh when it came out in print in 1919, it was very well-regarded when first produced,
with strong commercial runs in New York in 1920 and in London, where it debuted in 1921.

In between these two productions, it was performed in Vienna in German translation.
The play has consistently been praised for its enduring relevance and its use of metaphor, ambiguity and irony,
although it is undoubtedly a complex play, challenging to casts and directors alike.

While not the most famous of Shaw’s plays today, Heartbreak House has been frequently performed since its publication.
In 1932, it was revived at the Queen’s Theatre in London, with some members of the original London cast.

At the Cambridge Theatre, London in 1948, Robert Donat played Captain Shotover, and
several productions followed in the 1950s and 60s.

John Schlesinger produced the play at the National Theatre in 1975, and a revival in1983
at the Haymarket Theatre featured Rex Harrison as the Captain and Diana Rigg as Hesione.

Since the 90s, the female roles have been played by, among others, Vanessa Redgrave, Felicity Kendall and Patricia Hodge,
while Derek Jacobi, Richard Griffiths and Ronald Pickup have featured as male characters.

Notable revivals in the USA include the 1938 Mercury Theatre production in which Orson Wells played Shotover
and Vincent Price was Hector, and Broadway productions which followed in 1959 and 2006.

The BBC adapted the play for radio in the 1950s and 60s, and a 1977 BBC television adaptation starred
John Geilgud as Shotover, Barbara Murray as Lady Utterword and Siân Phillips as Hesione.

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