La casa dels cors trencats

George Bernard Shaw

La casa dels cors trencats is one of the great plays of George Bernard Shaw. Set in a house that functions as a metaphor of a ship and whose main characters are ridiculous aristocrats, eccentric suitors and iconoclastic women who challenge the moral hypocrisy and social conventions of the time, the Irish playwright paints a magnificent fresco of impossible relations in a world adrift marked by war. Shaw has the honour of being the only person to have received the Nobel Prize for Literature, in 1925, and to have won an Oscar (in 1938, for the best script adaptation for Pygmalion). His dramaturgy, characterised b ay biting irony, takes the form of ingenious word plays and infallible theatrical pyrotechnics. La casa dels cors trencats is a fine example of all this. Josep Maria Mestres, who successfully directed Lady Windermere’s Fan by Oscar Wilde, returns to the Sala Gran to direct an incisive comedy with an acid aftertaste. A play that, almost ninety years after its publication, still offers us a relevant criticism of cynicism and of the disaffection of our society. Perhaps, after all, things have not changed that much.