Performance Review

Boucicault Revived

Carolyn Williams

Art and Performance Notes

London Assurance, a comedy of manners tending toward farce, was the first of Boucicault's plays to be produced--in 1841, at the Theatre Royal, Covent Garden--and it was a huge success. For over four decades from that time, Boucicault wrote successfully in several theatrical genres and occasionally starred in his own plays. He was best known in his own day for his melodramas--especially his melodramas on the plight of the urban poor, his Irish plays (The Colleen Bawn and The Shaughraun, for example), a few notable plays about race and class relations in America (the best of which is The Octoroon), and that mid-Victorian blockbuster, his dramatization of The Corsican Brothers, which provided a star vehicle first for Charles Kean and later for Henry Irving--each of whom played both the brothers in a tour de force of romantic body-doubling. Queen Victoria saw The Corsican Brothers five times, and even G. H. Lewes, who usually liked "higher" fare, raved about its daring ingenuity.

It's important to keep in mind these other sides of Boucicault's dramaturgy, while recalling the recent revival of London Assurance at the Roundabout Theatre in New York, if only to cast one glance of the mind's eye toward the aesthetics and politics of theatrical revivalism. Would that we could hope for a revival of some of the melodramas, staged with spectacularly gorgeous and eerie special effects, tableaux, live music, and melodramatic acting style! I can imagine amazing productions of widely different sorts: those aiming for period authenticity or those aiming to update (either as a high modernist expressionist piece, or even with a more current, retro and postmodern overlay). And yet, the aesthetic of the melodrama is so far out of the mainstream today that my hope seems quite utopian at this time. However, I am so grateful to see any Boucicault--or indeed, any nineteenth-century drama before Wilde and Shaw--well-produced on the current stage that I don't want to look this elegant gift horse in the mouth.

London Assurance was in its own way a revival of sorts even in 1841, a mid-Victorian play set in the Regency period and harking back to Restoration comedy [End Page 49] as its chief model. These distinct historical layers may be detected in the form of the play, since most of the characters revolving around the protagonist are more recognizably "Victorian" than he. The plot--which thematically works out the pastoral opposition of overly-refined town manners to the "true" English manners of the countryside (in favor of the latter)--is certainly too farcically complex to summarize adequately, but here is the briefest possible version: Sir Harcourt Courtly (played in this production by Brian Bedford) is a town man, 63 years old but trying to pass for 40, a "veteran roué," as Boucicault describes him. He is engaged to marry Grace Harkaway (Kathryn Meisle), the 18-year-old niece of his old friend, the country squire Max Harkaway (David Schramm). The motives for this May-December match include, on Sir Harcourt's side, lust plus the financial inducement of Grace's estate and, on hers, an utter cynicism about marriage (after all, says Grace, "a younger husband might expect affection and nonsense") together with a complicated entail on her estate (to the effect that it will revert to Sir Harcourt's heir unless she marries Sir Harcourt). So, of course, Grace will have to end up marrying Sir Harcourt's heir, his son Charles Courtly (Rainn Wilson), with all sorts of "affection and nonsense" on her side. But first the play must make this outcome seem improbable, and then it must compound the obstacles until a state of astounded hilarity can be induced in the audience--at the sheer complexity of the farcical plot.

As the play opens, young Courtly has come home drunk, in the protective custody of a new acquaintance--whom no one knows--named Richard Dazzle (Christopher Evan Welch). After a number of crucial misunderstandings, the town folk separately agree to go to Oak Hall, Gloucestershire, the country estate of Max Harkaway, where the main action of the play takes place. At the country-house, various intrigues include: Dazzle pretending, in turn, to be related to just about everybody, though in fact he knows nobody; young Courtly persuading his own father that he is actually someone else; young Courtly's courtship of Grace under the cover of this assumed identity; and so forth. Into this already-complex scene comes a friend of Max's, the boisterous and charming horsewoman Lady Gay Spanker (Helen Carey) and her diminutive, hen-pecked husband, Mr. Adolphus ("Dolly") Spanker (Ken Jennings). Sir Harcourt becomes infatuated with Lady Gay, and she leads him on. The fun of the plot turns on these two interlocked love intrigues involving father and son, town and country, and two different sorts of the outspoken, independent woman.

Eventually the "London assurance" of the town men is overturned by the country wit of Grace and Lady Gay; everything gets sorted out; the young couple will marry and inherit the estate; Sir Harcourt sheepishly admits defeat, and speaks, in the end, against "London assurance" and for a more truly "gentlemanly ease" of manners. It's a conventional play (in the best sense of that word), and something of a disparate collection of elements, at that--though I haven't mentioned even half of them--but it's exuberant, rapid, and unabashed, and like so much nineteenth-century theatrical writing, it wasn't meant to be read and pondered, but to be performed. Reading this playtext is like reading a script of Fawlty Towers: you [End Page 50] [Begin Page 52] can tell it's full of business and meant to be hilarious, but it just lies there, flat, until it's realized by astute characterization, somewhat manic but very careful pacing, precise traffic control, and the audience's willing submission to the ridiculous. All of these criteria for enjoyment were in fact realized in the production at the Roundabout, which demonstrated clearly how well this play can work in performance. The direction by Joe Dowling--formerly artistic director of the Abbey Theatre in Dublin and now artistic director of the Guthrie Theater in Minneapolis--was close to ideal. The acting was uneven, though most of the central roles were strong.

Brian Bedford's performance was the popular linch-pin of this production. So absolutely foregrounded was he that his appearance opened a large question about the relative claims of a recreated period style, sealed-off and distanced as an artifact, as against the disruption of that objectification by the present-day star's star turn. This very question, however, would have been raised at the play's original performance in 1841, when the illustrious Madame Vestris and her husband Charles Mathews played the parts of Grace Harkaway and Richard Dazzle. In other words, one salient pleasure of the revival--then and now--is the pleasure of measuring a current star against a venerable (and in this case consummately ridiculous) theatrical type. Dowling's direction of Bedford in this case was astute. At his entrance, and intermittently throughout Act I, Bedford approached the audience conspiratorially, graciously acknowledging our recognition (see photo). Then Bedford appeals directly to us less and less, as Sir Harcourt becomes thoroughly enmeshed in plots not entirely of his own making. Thus Dowling and Bedford fused the audience's complicity with the outrageous Sir Harcourt early on, made us the mirror of his narcissism, and at the same time engaged our historical awareness of the characterization as both a social and a theatrical type.

The two female leads at the Roundabout gave wonderful performances in their strong, modern parts (for which the comedy of manners as a form and Boucicault as a playwright may both be given credit). Their forward-looking roles were wittily well-matched to Bedford's throw-back Sir Harcourt. Rouged and coiffed, he stood out against their less ostentatious costumes. Though they all plotted (and therefore everyone was theatrically insincere), it was he who was always seen to be attitudinizing--sometimes almost (but not quite) to the point of camp, and sometimes earnestly, passionately distressed (see photo). The women played more or less without self-ironization. Kathryn Meisle's Grace was an intelligent, self-sufficient girl who does fall in love but who nevertheless refuses to bend to her lover's manipulations. Meanwhile, Helen Carey as Lady Gay Spanker strode about the stage with unbridled gusto and forthright sex appeal, fully exploiting the innuendo allegorized in her name. More often than not, she held the reins of the plot. In fact, her character is the heart and soul of vitality, intelligence, and independence in this play, a standard of what the play holds up as true English nature.

Alas that the chief supporting male actors were not as good as they should have been. Both Rainn Wilson (as young Charles Courtly) and Christopher Evan Welch (as Richard Dazzle) were disappointing. [End Page 52] They played their duo much more in the manner of late twentieth-century teen-age sidekicks, scatter-brained and oblivious, than in that of a young Regency rake and his masterminding leech, the unstoppably brazen parvenu. Dazzle is a figure for the pure chance and random connection that can rule in modern, urban life, but in this performance both the sociological humor and the philosophical import of the part were muffled and unclear. Several other amusing social types filled out the dramatis personae, a valet and a lawyer in particular ("Cool" and "Meddle," well-played by John Horton and John Christopher Jones), the servant with impeccable manners and the country professional with gross, insinuating ones. These contributed to the flavor of this country-house stew.

It could be said that the play quite precisely conveys the sense of history in the making, since changing times do bring a wide variety of new and old social types together in one place--though the place, of course, is not always a country-house (as Boucicault knew as well as anyone). But we need never condescend to a writer like Boucicault, especially not about social verisimilitude. For that matter, it would be plausible to argue that Boucicault's devotion to spectacle, to performance, and to the overt theatricality of his representations actually constitutes a critique of representation itself. And in fact both premises are true: that Boucicault is interested in social realism and also in its undercutting by fantasy and theatricality. To some extent audiences react with pleasure--I reacted with pleasure--to the relatively ungoverned "feel" of history and sociology in this period piece. This response, I think, is elicited by a certain kind of revival. A more ironic mirth on the part of the critic might provide a sharper and more trenchant critical tool, but it might also be more unwittingly presentist and narcissistic, like the "London assurance" this play puts into question.

Of course, the play's answer to that question--"gentlemanly ease"--is not an adequate answer, even in the terms of the play itself, but begging the question in a farcical plot like this is part of the fun of it all. Dowling and Bedford finessed the play's question-begging ending in a brilliant move, as Bedford approached the audience at the closing moment, one last time, while all the other characters quietly exited to the rear. Bedford spoke to us, as he delivered the play's concluding speech against "London assurance" of manners, and his gesture of stepping partly out of the character of Sir Harcourt and toward the star's propria persona gave an aura of profundity to the play's last moment, closing the frame by breaking it, reminding us forcibly of the difficulties and pleasures of revival. The speech itself makes sense only gesturally, a little like the wrong moral for the story, but the emotional effect was just right, and that counted for a lot.

Carolyn Williams is a member of the faculty of the English Department at Rutgers University.

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