Places: Heartbreak House

Shotover’s Heartbreak Househouse. Sussex mansion of the eccentric and visionary Captain Shotover. Through the play’s first two acts, its characters seem completely unaware of the war in which Great Britain is engaged or their leadership responsibilities. Instead, they obsess over social niceties and their shallow affairs of the heart. Shaw’s satire of this aristocratic household culminates in the third act, in which Lady Utterword says that the only thing England needs to become quite comfortable, sensible, and healthy is for every country manor to have horses and proper stables.

Ellie Dunn dubs Shotover’s mansion “Heartbreak House” because of the many disappointed romances that surface there. However, George Bernard Shaw also implies that the name is appropriate because it represents the failure of the English ruling classes to lead England energetically and effectively through the turbulent war years.

Shotover’s garden. Garden outside Shotover’s house that is the scene of the third act. The garden symbolizes the possibility that the characters might move out of the center of their paralysis and frivolity toward meaningful political action. In the garden, the characters cannot ignore the war because there are enemy airships flying overhead dropping bombs in the distance. However, their response to a bomb that nearly hits the house is only a bizarre disappointment that the attack is not more devastating and thus exciting enough to rouse them out of their lethargic boredom.