Word: heartbreaking
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...Heartbreak House. Despite Shaw's sprawling treatment, this frankly symbolic picture of England's affluent society on the eve of the first World War is marvelous in bits and pieces. Maurice Evans, Pamela Brown, Diana Wynyard...
...Heartbreak House. Shaw's picture of Europe's pre-World War I leisure class, if wordy and sprawling, is also witty and brilliant, while several members of a cast that includes Maurice Evans, Pamela Brown, Diana Wynyard are brilliant...
...Heartbreak House. An uneven but often brilliant production of Shaw's uneven but often brilliant portrayal of "cultured, leisured Europe" before World War I. With Maurice Evans, Pamela Brown, Sam Levene, Diana Wynyard...
What Shaw also confessed about Heartbreak House was that he wrote it just as it came to him, with no formal plan. He need hardly have said so; along with largeness of conception goes a looseness of treatment, as much sprawl as size. As Shaw's characters explain themselves and react on one another in an evening-long, often brilliant conversation piece, something veers toward tragedy, something else explodes into farce, a philosophic aria gives way to a dialectical trio, fireworks light up the scene, flummery disfigures it. Heartbreak House is quite marvelous in bits and pieces...
Despite its manifold wit and moments of wisdom, the plotless Heartbreak House drifts along with its people, and at times reflects their languor. This is partly because Shaw's ante-bellum England is not in itself a theme, but only a framework for one. Where Chekhov portrayed something dramatic, the death-indeed the suicide-of a class, Shaw caught, at most, the malaise of a country. Moreover, his characters are all so busy explaining what they suffer from that though they convey a forcible sense of diagnosis, they give off only the most feeble sense of disease...