Christopher Newton’s gradually unsettling production of Heartbreak House begins with strains of Stravinsky’s Rite of Spring, one of music’s most potent statements of primitive energy and chaos. It ends with the sound of not too distant explosions as the Shotover household and their visitors stare upwards, transfixed by the airship carriers of death overhead. Destruction, one of the most fundamental needs of the human race, fascinates these folk, even if the impending destruction is their own.

This brief moment is all the more disturbing because we have repeatedly verified the absence of self-respect in the household. We have heard the native land referred to as “this soul’s prison called England”. We have heard “nothing ever does happen” and then “nothing will happen”.  Of course, World War I is waiting in the wings to destroy a generation and, bored or not, this self destroying human species is about to do itself in. No wonder that the Captain asks “Do you suppose at my age that I make distinction between one character and another?” Regarding people, he has seen it all before and anticipates nothing new.

The Shotover home of eccentricity is also one of lazy ennui, one too weary to be cynical as in this exchange: “How can you love a liar?” “You can, unfortunately; otherwise there wouldn’t be much love in the world”.  Ergo we later hear, “If we women were particular about men’s characters, we would never get married at all”.  As usual men, women, and humankind all get poked by GBS’s sharply perceptive pen and he has Hector -aced delightfully vain, roguish and practical by Blair Williams- assess our species as “useless, futile creatures…… there is no point to us”. Of course, these are people of diversion who thrive on games to redirect their pointlessness and Hesione declares, “It matters little who governs the country as long as we govern you”.

The set by Leslie Frankish is made of bold visual elements and the country house doubles as the hull of a ship. It soon seems more like a Sartrean hell than a hull. The ship’s sails hang heavily over library shelves and later, symbol of humanity’s doom, the masts of this vessel in a storm collapse. There are some spirited back and forth battles in this setting—Hesione and Ellie, Hesione and Boss Mangan– but mostly the undercurrent is humanity doing its decline through individual lives. These folks rant, they compete, they chat away but make no mark of substance. They are lightly amused by one another, but nothing they do really matters, and they seem to know it. Their futility is in the air.

Michael Ball as Shotover is gruff, individualistic, self-perpetuating and weathered like a solid seashore rock. His puttering manner and voice possess a seen-it-all wisdom for he has known enough of humanity’s ways to know what comes next. Because of Ball’s shaping of Shotover as hopelessness with a heart, we warm to Shotover and like his company. Ellie is played subdued with quiet longing and an implicit and fetching reticence about life by Robin Evan Willis. This Ellie is a heart looking for mooring, yet she is also assured and precocious in womanly manipulation of Mangan. She wants Hector, who is married to Hesione and learns in short order that almost all is false in the world. This floating take on Ellie compels us to make sense of her and come to terms with what we discover.

Laurie Paton’s snobbish Ariadne has a chirpy, sometimes automatic, musicality of voice that reveals her to be stuck in one of life’s roles. Deborah Hay, in a dark wig, is a Hesione who has both world- punished qualities in her person but also an inherent gusto with a sexy bite to it. She seems tuned in to the outer world. The nerdish-looking Mazzini Dunn of Patrick McManus, who looks like Franz Shubert after an electrical shock, and Patrick Galligan’s self-directed Randall add distinct flavours to this human brew, as do Patricia Hamilton and William Vickers. Benedict Campbell does moneyed confidence with a deep resonant syrup of a voice. His Mangan is adept at crass manipulation of lives and one of his notches is that he ruined Ellie’s father. He will stay up all night “thinking how to save six pence” and a nasty fellow is he, all anxious and centred with darkness.

Newton’s production is one of compelling scenes held together thematically by a thread of ongoing futility. All the cards of meaning in life have been played, only petty ritual remains, and these characters ache almost by rote because they have little to offer. They are hollow and without purpose no matter their rants and schemes. They float without development because they sense inwardly that there is nothing of true interest in life or themselves and no place in life to go.

This is hard stuff to show in a production because ennui on stage can beget ennui in the audience.  Newton, however, has shaped an atmosphere that pointedly reflects and creates on stage a pointless and worn out society just existing, just getting by in futility by means of diversion. We in the audience know that war and their demise are coming, since the creation of Heartbreak House coincided with World War I, and nothing can be done.  As a group these characters embody such futility.

That sense of nothing can be done and that twin sense of nothing much to do are hard to achieve and Newton succeeds with accumulating effect upon us. He gives us subtly engaging characterization and entertaining theatrical encounters, he gives us shades of poignancy, to be sure. But most of all, he gives us cause for profound sadness because, in these people, we so often see ourselves. Their self-indulgence is not purpose, their shallowness is not is not salvation, and thus we observe that our pointless species will not, cannot, change