Heartbreak House

Ellie Dunn has been invited to a house shaped like a ship—but when she arrives, nobody knows she is coming. Then an old captain asks whether her father was a pirate.

In the Sussex hills, at the end of a September evening, Captain Shotover’s eccentric home is all ship’s timber, tools and unexpected visitors. Written during the First World War, Bernard Shaw’s play gathers Ellie, the captain and his family in a society whose polished manners cannot conceal its confusion about what matters. Ellie is tired, neglected and looking for welcome; the household offers her instead a fierce old man, a dubious cup of tea and surprises she was never warned about. As private ambitions and public dangers press closer, can anyone aboard this peculiar ship find a steady course?

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