Another play, another country house setting in Pitlochry’s Country Matters season. But Shaw’s Heartbreak House is a very different place from Goldsmith’s Liberty Hall or Stoppard’s Sidley Park in Arcadia. As Charles Cusick Smith’s nautical settings for the home of Captain Shotover makes clear, this house is adrift on the high seas of history, at the mercy of providence. And, as Shotover says later, what providence usually has in store for captains who are adrift is running into the rocks.

In this case, the rocks are the First World War, and Shotover’s glamorous daughters Ariadne and Hesione sum up everything that Shaw wants to see overthrown in the opportunity for modernisation that the war brings: the social pretension, the casual cruelty, the shallowness. And yet both are beautiful, charming, and effortlessly seductive, Shaw once again making that which he despises devilishly attractive.

Jacqueline Dutoit is at her brittle best as the older Ariadne. But if you were thinking of catching John Durnin’s production – and opportunities to see any Shaw these days are thin on the ground – my advice would be to cut along as soon as possible to be sure of catching Deirdre Davis in a show-stopping performance as the younger Hesione.

Davis, normally a stalwart of BBC Scotland’s River City soap, is temporarily standing in for Karen Davies, who is indisposed. Despite having to rehearse the role at short notice, she lights up the stage every time she enters.

In other respects, it’s a slow-burning production that occasionally looks as if it might come to a standstill in the Shavian verbiage. But it is a slow-burning play too, and there are just enough bits of Shavian wit (“What’s important is not to have the last word but to have your own way”) and the odd moment of business to maintain our attention. Dougal Lee, as a more vulnerable Boss Mangan than the usual rapacious capitalist, does a neat forward roll when he is tipped out of his chair while in his hypnotic trance, which got a round of applause all by itself.

And Durnin repays our patience in the end as he draws the threads together in the final act and the war that nobody has mentioned finally breaks through. Having married her fortunes together with the captain, the only other decent character in the play, Ellie Dunn, the young woman who symbolises the modernity Shaw prefers (played with great composure by Helen Millar, always sensible but never a prig), is left caught in a blood-red glow as a brief tableau of the Flanders slaughter lights up the back of the stage.

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