G. B. Shaw's Heartbreak House and Harold Pinter's The Homecoming : Comedies of Implosion

G. B. Shaw's Heartbreak House (1919) and Harold Pinter's The Homecoming (1965) are two of twentieth-century British drama's premier plays. Shaw's debt to Chekhov's Cherry Orchard is too well known for rehearsal here, while the Pinter play mines preoccupations displayed as early as The Room, reflecting his indebtedness to Samuel Becket's fiction among others. Though nearly half a century separates these two works and though Shaw had no discernable influence on Pinter, a side-by-side comparison illuminates not only their differences but underlying preoccupations they share, emanating from formal and social values.

Both playwrights are outsiders, Shaw famously considering himself a "downstart" Irish protestant, and Pinter a secular Jew. Born in 1930, twenty years before Shaw's death, Pinter, like Shaw, works within the conventions of fourth-wall realism. As Christopher Innes says of Pinter, both plays are "models of power structures," though unlike Shaw, Pinter depicts "political themes in purely personal terms."¹ Shaw views his play as a scrim through which to visualize a corrupt, demoralized European society, emphasizing his point through his lengthy commentary and ship interior set standing in for imperial England. Pinter's down-at-the-heels setting obliquely acknowledges a larger urban context, but reduces "politics to a worm's eye view."²

If we consider how interchangeable the two plays' titles are, their underlying similarities reverberate even more meaningfully. Both plays exploit an enduring archetype deeply rooted in the dramatic form: the impact of one or more outsiders on a closed, emotionally conflicted family group, eliciting long-buried antagonisms and flimsy lies, the unforeseen death of a minor character and, in both plays, futile attempts, after the departure or expulsion of an outsider, at reforming the shattered social group. Quite ironically, both playwrights work twists on this time-honored plot device: Shaw's "outsider" Ellie becomes through "heartbreak" an "insider," in effect the third of Shotover's daughters, defeating her rival, Hesione Hushabye, and discarding her putative lover, Mangan. In The Homecoming, Ruth rejects her husband, Teddy, who may have offered marriage as a form of redemption. She then seamlessly re-enters her former profession on her own terms.

Neither Shaw nor Pinter has available the highly artificial Elizabethan convention of the soliloquy, which allowed characters to reveal their inner thoughts to the audience. However, characters in both their plays feel driven to embarrassing, self-abnegating confessions that serve much the same purpose. Their enigmatic characters let slip buried snippets of memory, giving the audience few guideposts to distinguish truth from fiction—if Pinter even considers the distinction meaningful. Shaw's characters are knowable, if complex and neurotic, occasionally breaking into recitations of agonized, but recognizably truthful insights into their pasts. Pinter's characters, like Shaw's, are often self-deluded but even more distanced from reality, both theirs and ours: they are all unreliable narrators at times. Where Shaw overexplains, Pinter's dialogue is spare, even cryptic. What Shaw achieves in scope and breadth, Pinter gains in depth and ambiguity. Their plays can be called "comedies of implosion" as, despite the final offstage explosions in Shaw, the characters in self-destructing reveal the emptiness they had struggled to conceal from both themselves and us. Rolf Fjelde approvingly quotes R. D. Laing's definition of "implosion" as "the final precipitation of a state of dread which experiences the full terror of the world as liable at any moment to crash and obliterate all identity,"³ language that aptly describes the moods of both the Shaw and Pinter plays.

In dismissing Pinter's Jessie as "no more than an offstage, inarticulate figure" (italics mine), Mireia Aragay slights the grip offstage, unseen characters exert on the behavior of both playwrights' onstage figures.⁴ Shaw's Hastings Utterword and Shotover's unnamed "Negress" (Shaw's word) wife occupy archetypal positions roughly analogous to Pinter's Macgregor and Jessie. These characters all appear sharply bifurcated, joining power and passivity, eliciting both idealization and fearful contempt from onstage figures. Though Hastings exemplifies great political authority as "governor...