Heartbreak House returns - Welles triumph gets short shrift

[NoFake]

Heartbreak House is back on Broadway, and has elicited the same critical ambivalence as Welles' 1938 production. What irks me is that in the TheaterMania review, Welles' triumph, which placed him on the cover of Time magazine, isn't even mentioned; while the critic, in citing the Mercury production, takes pains to quote what he claims is a portion of Stark Young's review -- which Frank Brady characterizes completely differently.

Brady: "Stark Young of the New Republic had some reservations about the play... but still managed to deem it 'a capital event,' admiring its 'energy, lively attack, sincerity and bold theater intelligence.'"

TheaterMania: "Heartbreak House isn't an easy play. Indeed, it has confounded the most intelligent critics. The highly respected commentator Stark Young once thought it the best of Shaw's plays but, in response to the Mercury Theatre's 1938 revival, decided instead that it was "garrulous, unfelt and tiresome."

Are these two different Stark Young reviews? It seems unlikely that the a critic could talk out of both sides of his mouth, so to speak, in the same review.

[Wellesnet]

This Ageless Soul, a 1938 New Yorker article by Russel Maloney, takes a look at the young Orson Welles's production of Hearbreak House, which had been staged the previous spring,
https://www.newyorker.com/magazine/1938 ... eless-soul