There is nothing so unfamiliar as this familiar world of ours in the all-transforming hands of Shaw. And there is no play of Shaw's in which the world appears more elusive, more charmingly decadent, and less itself than in "Heart break House." The Repertory players enjoy the privilege of giving the play its first staging in Boston.

Heartbreak House in Shavian language means Europe-Before-The-War, as the playwright revealed in his preface. But most of the playgoers had no preface to guide them and laugh as hard as they would they couldn't make heads or tails of it all. Oh, it was very funny, and quite too cynical for words, but somehow just what it meant the audience couldn't decide. They stood around in wavering little circles in the lobby between the first and second acts and tugged at friends' coat-tails and squeaked "What do you think this is all about?" And the friends squeaked back, "I don't know, I'm sure, do you?"

And then everyone went into the darkened theatre and wriggled and twisted in his seat and felt vaguely that Shaw must be hitting at him, just because Shaw was always hitting at him. One cannot blame them for wriggling, for when they weren't suffering for the actors. The actors didn't know their lines and took little pains to conceal the state of affairs from the audience. And the audience was far more distressed than the old stagers of the Repertory.

Playing Shaw is never an unmixed blessing, and playing Shaw in a repertory theatre is an out and out curse to the leading actors. The Mines one must learn for this week one must forget for next, and Monday night gives no criterion of the excellences that Friday may bring forth. It is manifestly unfair for any reviewer who saw the play on its opening night to advise an audience which will visit its closing performance. Any review must be one of impressions of circumstances which no longer exist.

On its first showing here "Heartbreak House" disturbed more than it satisfied, and the explanation for this is to be sought as much in its performance as in its book. The persons of the play are not all mere Shavian types, but present among their numbers true character studies. And it is in playing these character studies that the Repertory actors excelled. There was a flatness of level in their portrayal of the types, a tendency to overplay and make garishly unreal the half people, which was remarkably absent from their rendering of the character parts.

Of all the performances of the evening the playing of Peg Entwistle as Ellie Duan was the most interesting. When the play opened upon its strange first scene, the room like a ship's cabin in Heartbreak House, Ellie Dunn was a living character. Before the play was half over she had turned from a young and attractive girl with her own personality to a type hard and cold and self-seeking. And when the play ended she was again become a living personality. It was this transition which Illustrated most exactly the difference between Shaw's characters and his types.

Louis Hall entered into the enviable role of Captain, forgetful, superhuman, old gargoyle of a man, with extraordinary understanding and carried the play on his shoulders in many places. The second character part of note, that of Mazzini Dunn, an elusive, kindly, never-get-rich old fellow who had the honor to be Ellie's father, was admirably filled by Horace Pollock. And Ralph Roberts stole a large slice of the second act from under the noses of the rest of the cast with his Cockney dialect and the little playlet all his own, a gift from Shaw to the confusion of the British people