Word: shaws
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Dates: during 1950-1959
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...couldn't bear the thought of being ahead--no good come-from-behind does that--so they got clobbered in the first game by an 11-0 count. The amazing Ted Kluszewski hit two homers. The Chicagoans looked like they would repeat the performance next day, but young Buck Shaw threw three bad pitches. Two were hits out of the park by 155-pound Charlie Neal, the other by Chuck Essegian--the first of his two pinch homers that set a Series record...
Shotover's son-in-law Hector is another of Shaw's Chinese-puzzle characters, whose identity opens up like a box to reveal a new one underneath, leaving him a paradox that is never resolved. One of his personae is that of the romantic hero, with a moustache "like a bronze candlestick" and a general air of being a cross between the Prisoner of Zenda and Henry V. Hector is also a boaster and a liar and his wife's lapdog, but he is so totally footling and gormless in Dennis Price's portrayal that his cries of agony...
There are some better performances among the seven stars. As Shotover's indescribable daughter Hesione, Diana Wynward is splendid, and Pamela Brown is at least intriguing as her sister Ariadne, Lady Utterword. (They are not the "demon women" Hector describes, but that is Shaw's fault more than theirs.) Ellie Dunn, who begins as a romantic ingenue and becomes one of the quietly scary, hard-as-nails young women only Shaw could create, is played well enough by Diane Cilento...
...woeful misconception of Shotover and Hector throws the play irretrievably out of focus, converting it into an unsuccessful attempt at mild country-house comedy. Alan Webb, Sorrell Booke, and Patrick Horgan are excellent in roles that can be played like refugees from Noel Coward; but Shaw had incomparably greater things in mind...
Heartbreak House has no plot, and its wit flashes, as its farce pops, only intermittently. Shaw's characters are too idiosyncratic for Heartbreak House to be, as he intended it, "cultured, leisured England before the war." But the form of Checkhov and the style and content of Shaw combine in a haunting semi-darkness that retains its excitement when the hard bright light of ordinary Shaw tires the mind's eye. Its primary quality is this atmosphere, which requires exactly the sort of orchestration of every element that Mr. Clurman has notably failed to provide...