George Bernard Shaw a penn State Electronic Classics Series Publication

Heartbreak House
Men who had just read the news that Charles Wyndham
was dying, and were thereby sadly reminded of Pink Domi-
nos and the torrent of farcical comedies that followed it in

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Heartbreak House
his heyday until every trick of that trade had become so stale
that the laughter they provoked turned to loathing: these
veterans also, when they returned from the field, were as
much pleased by what they knew to be stale and foolish as
the novices by what they thought fresh and clever.
Commerce in the Theatre
Wellington said that an army moves on its belly. So does a
London theatre. Before a man acts he must eat. Before he
performs plays he must pay rent. In London we have no
theatres for the welfare of the people: they are all for the sole
purpose of producing the utmost obtainable rent for the pro-
prietor. If the twin flats and twin beds produce a guinea more
than Shakespeare, out goes Shakespeare and in come the twin
flats and the twin beds. If the brainless bevy of pretty girls
and the funny man outbid Mozart, out goes Mozart.
Unser Shakespeare
Before the war an effort was made to remedy this by estab-
lishing a national theatre in celebration of the tercentenary
of the death of Shakespeare. A committee was formed; and
all sorts of illustrious and influential persons lent their names
to a grand appeal to our national culture. My play, The Dark
Lady of The Sonnets, was one of the incidents of that ap-
peal. After some years of effort the result was a single hand-
some subscription from a German gentleman. Like the cel-
ebrated swearer in the anecdote when the cart containing all
his household goods lost its tailboard at the top of the hill
and let its contents roll in ruin to the bottom, I can only say,
“I cannot do justice to this situation,” and let it pass without
another word.
The Higher Drama put out of Action
The effect of the war on the London theatres may now be
imagined. The beds and the bevies drove every higher form
of art out of it. Rents went up to an unprecedented figure.
At the same time prices doubled everywhere except at the

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GB Shaw
theatre pay-boxes, and raised the expenses of management
to such a degree that unless the houses were quite full every
night, profit was impossible. Even bare solvency could not
be attained without a very wide popularity. Now what had
made serious drama possible to a limited extent before the
war was that a play could pay its way even if the theatre were
only half full until Saturday and three-quarters full then. A
manager who was an enthusiast and a desperately hard
worker, with an occasional grant-in-aid from an artistically
disposed millionaire, and a due proportion of those rare and
happy accidents by which plays of the higher sort turn out
to be potboilers as well, could hold out for some years, by
which time a relay might arrive in the person of another
enthusiast. Thus and not otherwise occurred that remark-
able revival of the British drama at the beginning of the cen-
tury which made my own career as a playwright possible in
England. In America I had already established myself, not as