Heartbreak House

Young Ellie Dunn arrives for a weekend at the strange, ship-shaped country house of the eccentric old Captain Shotover, an inventor of explosives who is half mad and wholly wise. Among the guests, all of whom seem to be lying to themselves and to each other, are Ellie's father, her fiancé, the rich businessman Boss Mangan, and the captain's two dazzling daughters. As their illusions fall away one by one, bombers appear in the night sky.

Bernard Shaw wrote the play during the First World War and published it in 1919, calling it 'a fantasia in the Russian manner on English themes', after Chekhov, as a portrait of the cultured, idle Europe that drifted into the war. Read Pygmalion and Arms and the Man.