Theatre: Heartbreak House
The Abbey’s new production of George Bernard Shaw’s provocative play captures all its delicious madness, while channelling also the subtle and corrosive anguish that runs through the play. Set in the surreal home of an eccentric English family in 1914, it satirises the ‘spiritualist’ fads rife among the upper classes in the years prior to World War I, a mysticism that masked a deep-seated spiritual disenchantment.
Shaw drenches the play in references to the supernatural. The head of the zany household, an ex-mariner called Captain Shotover (Mark Lambert), strives to attain “the seventh degree of concentration”, while his daughters, Hessione (Kathy Kiera Clarke) and Ariadne (Aislín McGuckin), each possess strange affective powers akin to witchcraft. Hessione’s husband, the louche but irresistible Hector Hushabye (Nick Dunning) casts his own spell, while Ellie Dunn (Lisa Dwyer Hogg) – the aspirational class-climbing ingénue – is something of an amateur mesmerist. When arch-capitalist, Boss Mangan (Don Wycherley), has “a presentiment” late on, however, it points to something very much of this world – the terrible war about to engulf Europe in bloodshed. Though never directly mentioned, the First World War is the structuring absence that informs this apocalyptic tale.
