In Tim Carroll’s new production of George Bernard Shaw’s Heartbreak House, we are watching a strange kind of chess.
The stage floor is a duotone game board, atop which are just a few chairs, brought in and out and re-positioned by the black-clad Maid and Butler as the play unfolds. Two additional chairs are suspended rakishly above the action.
The action is plentiful: aristocrats and aspirants, and servants and scammers move through these squares continuously. But unlike in chess, they each wear both black and white.
So it’s chess without clear teams: bored aristocrats playing board games … while the world burns.
Opening position: It’s a daring choice to mount this realistic, talky drama in the spare, representational Jackie Maxwell Studio stage.
Shaw wrote Heartbreak House during World War 1. This game board represents retired Captain Shotover’s estate, which we are told he built to resemble the bridge of a ship. We’ll have to imagine that. In fact, we’ll have to imagine almost everything this satirical fever dream about a cultured England whose self-absorbed aristocrats are too complacent to notice the bombs—literal and figurative—laying waste to morality, enterprise and the broader world order. Set and costume designer Ximena Pinilla offers us nothing to distract from their myopia.
The players: As Shotover, Tom Rooney rushes in and out, mouthing cryptic warnings, delivering glancing blows, then shuffling off. His eccentric household churns with romantic betrayals, financial schemes, and existential apathy. Shotover’s daughter Hesione (Julia Course) manipulates those around her for sport, tearing down relationships to escape her own boredom. Newly returned Ariadne (an imperious Sochi Fried) provides a catty counterweight to her sister’s chaos with her craving for Imperial certainty and proper decorum. And Martin Happer makes Hesione’s philandering husband Hector almost impossibly languid: he is over each of his many dalliances almost before it begins.
Allison Edwards-Crewe’s young Ellie, who is engaged to Graeme Somerville’s industrialist Boss Mangan, arrives as a seeming idealist, then moves through disillusionment toward something harder—all of which she convincingly navigates. And Somerville is intense and riveting. He delivers a proud paean to vulture capitalism, in which he spit-sings about buying distressed assets to strip-mine founders’ sweat equity and intellectual capital. (It lands spookily close to home in 2026). The counterweight is his shocking vulnerability as he is flayed of his illusions and disguises.
The machinery: There’s much more here, but the real revelations are Kristi Frank’s Maid and Michael Therriault’s Butler. These characters don’t exist in Shaw’s play, and they do more than move chairs around. They verbalize all of the play’s stage directions, helping us understand where and how the characters move. Their words take on the quality of invocation or even puppetry—as if these aristocratic game players move at their direction.
We don’t even hear the sounds identified in their spoken stage directions. Whether it’s the bang of an item dropping or the explosion of a bomb, the sounds are reported by Maid and Butler to have happened … and then everyone on stage responds as if they had heard them.
It’s as if these two servants alone are clear-sighted enough to access the reality of this world. The aristocrats? Too tightly sealed inside their abstraction. And we spectators? Just as limited and dependent on them. Before the play begins and between its acts, they banter improvisationally with audience members, even playfully seeking our input on chair placement.
Without Maid and Butler, we could never know what is happening. There’s a potent comment here on who has access to reality.
The cost: The abstraction of the game board and this mediated approach cuts deep. When we’re held at such distance from these characters, their scheming, blathering and quibbling (and really, that’s the play) can tip from fascinating into tedious.
Heartbreak House is a long play. It feels longer this way.
The resonance: And yet … this tedium may be Carroll’s magnification of Shaw’s point. These game-players, sealed off from reality and shorn of visible traces of their era, refract uncomfortably into our moment, when (in only slightly less egregious ways) we insulate ourselves from wars in Ukraine, Gaza and Iran, trade wars closer to home, rampant corruption, wanton climate destruction, an AI-fuelled orgy of layoffs and corporate consolidation, and—
I’ll stop there. But it’s all here, peeking out at us in the words of these bored aristocrats.
Endgame: The (unheard) bombs fall. The ending’s quiet devastation reveals who survives and who doesn’t. The irony never touches the only ones savvy enough to be fully outside it: the Maid and the Butler.
“We have been here too long,” murmured Hector earlier. ”We do not live in this house: we haunt it.” He is describing his family, but Carroll’s staging makes the line land differently. Shorn of their setting and sealed inside their fevered, talky abstraction, all of these characters are ghosts: black and white pieces drifting across the squares.
Worn down, watching from perches in our own grid of seats, we’re haunting alongside them.
Heartbreak House is on stage at the Shaw Festival’s Jackie Maxwell Studio Theatre until October 3, 2026. Tickets are available at shawfest.com.
© Scott Sneddon, Sesaya Arts Magazine 2026
