Sex, feminism, politics, doom in complex package

"It is said that every people has the Government it deserves. It is more to the point that every Government has the electorate it deserves."

No, that comment was not made by a pundit surveying the current state of our world — though surely it could have been. It was penned in 1919 by George Bernard Shaw, in the preface to his play "Heartbreak House."

Shaw's apocalyptic fantasia casts a hard light on some ineffectual and oblivious representatives of "cultured, leisured Europe," who banter and bicker as war clouds gather on the horizon.

If the play doesn't offer a direct analogy to our present global condition, it's clear why Intiman Theatre finds it timely in 2006.

But "Heartbreak House" is no Edwardian tea party to stage. With its abrupt shifts in tone and prolix talk of romance and philosophy, it's a bear to do well. Director Jon Jory and an ensemble of capable actors manage to wrestle it to the mat by the end, but not without a struggle.

That's nothing new: "Heartbreak House" confounded many in its London debut. (Shaw's wife despised it.) Subtitled "A Fantasia in the Russian Manner on English Themes," this cyanide-laced drawing-room comedy is thick with parallels to Chekhov's plays and Shakespeare's "King Lear," among other touchstones.

And it presages the surreal doomsday scenarios depicted decades later in Sartre's "No Exit" and Beckett's "Endgame."

There is much to ponder and laugh at in this study of people whose "foolish lives of romance and sentiment and snobbery" would be upturned by World War I. The main challenge is animating the first two acts, and reconciling Shaw's witty volleys with his bleak ironies and heartbreaks.

Jory's mounting, on a shiplike set by Christopher Akerlind, feels slow and brittle in swatches of Act 1. But it has a sturdy core in the key performances of Alexandra Tavares and Michael Winters. Tavares plays Ellie, a genteel-poor young woman who begins losing her romantic illusions the moment she sets foot in an eccentric Sussex villa. Winters is Captain Shotover, the curmudgeonly old patriarch who presides over the place and develops an unusual affinity with Ellie.

When they meet, Shotover is so misanthropic, he's inventing an extra-lethal type of dynamite. His biggest disappointments? Daughters Hesione (Kate Goehring), an aging coquette who flaunts frivolity, and snobby Ariadne (Suzanne Bouchard), who long ago fled to a more conventional existence as a diplomat's wife.

As in Chekhov, most of the assembled are absurdly infatuated with the wrong people. Gullible Ellie has a crush on a dashing adventurer, who turns out to be Hesione's ineffectual rogue of a husband, Hector (Stephen Pelinski).

Hesione throws herself at Ellie's honorably immune father, Mazzini (David Pichette). Hector chases Adriane, and so on.

As in many Shaw works, sex, feminism and politics are enmeshed. And there is concern for Ellie's soul, if she marries the mercenary capitalist Mangan (Laurence Ballard). But there is far less optimism about reforming the world here than in earlier Shaw works.

The Shavian chatter is, of course, always witty. But the production comes most to life in quieter moments between Ellie and Shotover, in some hilarious slapstick bits by R. Hamilton Wright, as Ariadne's nebbish brother-in-law, and in the shadowy, fatalistic reveries of Act 3, as this ship of fools both fear and welcome a cataclysmic and inevitable change.

Misha Berson: mberson@seattletimes.com