Partying on as the tide turns

Shaw’s satire of the rich who ignored the rumblings of WWI is still relevant, says Padraic Kileen

AMID the many sentimental commemorations of the centenary of World War I, the Abbey Theatre is staging George Bernard Shaw’s comedy, Heartbreak House. It treats the ‘Great War’ with appropriate horror and a satirical edge.

Shaw furiously opposed the war, from 1914 to 1918, which soured the Dublin writer’s popularity in his adopted home of England. It also prompted him to hold back on publishing Heartbreak House — which travestied the complacent lead-up to the war — until 1920. The play is a blackly comic dissection of the leisured classes in England and their inertia when war might have been averted.