Kenneth Hurren on the National's triumphal ark
Heartbreak House by Bernard Shaw (National Theatre, Old Vic)
The captain is in his bunk, drinking bottled ditch-water; and the crew is gambling in the forecastle. She will strike and sink and split. Do you think the laws of God will be suspended in favour of England because you were born in it?
Thus Captain Shotover, eightyeight years old, the spirit of a bygone and golden age, disenchanted now and rum-sodden and slightly mad in an amiable sort of way. He is, it is commonly agreed, Shaw's personal spokesman in Heartbreak House, this being an occasion on which the impish old sage chose to wear his apocalyptic hat, and there is a certain amount of evidence to suggest that this is how he wanted posterity to see him: speaking from the heart of what he thought to be his best play, and probably from his own heart as well; a prophet of doom but, on the whole, a remarkably genial one. He was writing at the time of the first world war, and he got the prophecies wrong then, just as we may hope that they are wrong now, but the play seems always to be on the brink of a disastrous topicality, and I should find it hard to quarrel with either the sentiment or the shrewdness of Shaw's self-judgement.
1 confess to being a late convert to the belief that this is his best play, my conversion being as recent as last week when it was revived by the National Theatre under John Schlesinger's direction, and revived stunningly well. The production is a beauty — any flaws there may be in it quite eluded my scrutiny — and the play seemed to me both fascinating in its details and magnificent in its total conception. It exhibits to a superior degree those qualities that have always been the most beguiling in Shaw's writing, from the mischievous wit of his remarks about English society, especially in its upper reaches, to the absurd and engaging arrogance of his political rhetoric. Beyond these appreciable virtues, though, there is here the rich poetic eloquence of Shaw the visionary before it all got, in some of the later plays, so boozily out of hand as he retreated from a reality he must have found ineffably discouraging into the intoxicating world of eccentric fancy. It is also a work of impressive discipline and control, despite the dramatist's insistence that this was a play he began writing without the faintest notion of how it would end. It has sometimes seemed to me in the past that the organisation of the piece was somewhat, as it were, unstructured — verging, even, on the ramshackle — and that the third act, say, bore some earmarks of rather desperate improvisation. I see now that I was mistaken. Every development is foreshadowed in what precedes it, and it is a rare feat of technical craftsmanship to bring together in any kind of unity the disparate styles suggested by Kaufman and Hart, Oscar Wilde and the Holy Bible — the last in the climactic proceedings that appear to derive, in design, about equally from gospel accounts of the Flood and of the destruction of Sodom. Even in the comedy of manners, and above the prattle of the frivolously disillusioned, the ear may catch the heart's cry of a doomed era.
The play, if I may nudge your memory, is set in a Sussex mansion — the home of Captain Shotover — which has the aspect of "an old-fashioned high-pooped ship", and which we are clearly asked to regard as a "ship of state" and perhaps also as an ark. All the characters (there are ten of them) are to some extent symbols, embodying an assortment of qualities and ideas associated with the declining fortunes of England. Some of them are also walking paradoxes; and most of them are involved, at the play's most explicit level, in a dismaying muddle of social and sexual relationships (the subtitle of the work is "a fantasia in the Russian manner on English themes") as well as being vital ingredients in Shaw's allegory of a society drifting to destruction and oblivion. There are, for examples, the captain's two daughters, representing a ruling class far gone in moral bankruptcy; a burglar and a capitalist, who are ingeniously equated as the thieves of civilisation; a mildly disillusioned Fabian whose expectation of revolution has dwindled to a recognition that "the usual poverty and crime and drink" will just go on; his young daughter, the bright hope of the future, whose romanticism is defeated by materialism; and, among the others, the old captain's nurse who is, of course, Irish and is called Guinness.
Shaw looked at this society, and the pass to which it had come, more in sorrow than in anger. There is something peculiarly affectionate even in his indignation over its follies and failures. He may have disdained the snobbish values of Lady Ariadne, the captain's daughter, home from one of the crown colonies (her husband has been governor of all of them in turn), but it was an amused disdain and he did not make her a ninny. She has, rather, a vivacious turn of phrase. "There are only two classes in good society in England," she remarks at one point, "the equestrian classes and the neurotic classes," and there was just a moment when I mused on whether Shaw was ever tempted to give us, not Heartbreak House, but the flip side, Horseback Hall.
Ariadne is played by Anna Massey and her sister, Hesione, by Eileen Atkins, with the kind of wicked magnetism that gives the male of the species no better chance than an iron filing, the pair of them plainly figments of an early Bloomsbury imagination; which suits them admirably to the Shavian purpose. Their father, crank and prophet, a peppery symbol of all that was best in Old England, is Colin Blakely, very reasonably got up to look — as far as their differences in physique will allow — like Shaw himself, in a performance of masterly understanding. Paul Rogers gets every detail superbly right as Boss Mangan, the capitalist with no capital, living on speculative margins, travelling expenses and credit; and Kate Nelligan, who bowled us all over last year in Knuckle, does it all over all over again as young Ellie Dunn, coolly and tellingly holding her own with the veterans in the key duologues with Hesione, Mangan and Shotover. I have space to do no more than list the other half of the cast — Alan MacNaughtan (Ellie's father), Graham Crowden (Hesione's husband), Edward de Souza (Ariadne's brother-in-law), Patience Collier (the nurse) and Harty Lomax (the burglar) — though all are excellent; and Schlesinger's direction, aided and abetted by the sets of Michael Annals and the lighting by Richard Pilbrow, is a masterpiece of interpretation and orchestration.
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