20.09.11 The Belle’s Stratagem (Red Handed Theatre Company at the Southwark Playhouse)

A fabulous production of a brilliant play by Hannah Cowley (1743–1809). In her programme note, the director, Miss Jessica Swales (I’m copying the programme’s period style of address), describes how she dusted off Cowley’s manuscript and was struck by “the authoress’s progressive parlance and ideas” and her claim – most unusual for 1780, and not so common in 2011 – that “women create their own destiny and that a man might want more than beauty in a wife”. Whatever next? Women being allowed to vote? Swales continues:

Miss Cowley, in 1780, seems to be in the same predicament as my friends and I. We debate the confounding expectations of the sexes and question the merits of marriage, commitment and adherence to social mores. What has changed?

Not much, which is one reason why this play is not of archival interest only but a fascinating and hugely entertaining slice of social comedy. Joseph Macnab is superb as Sir George Touchwood, a husband in an almost permanent state of bug-eyed apoplexy over his wife’s alarming notions of independence:

Heaven and earth, with whom can a man trust his wife, in the present state of society? Formerly there were distinctions of character amongst ye. . . grandmothers were pious, aunts circumspect, old maids censorious, but now, aunts, grandmothers, girls, and maiden gentlewomen are all the same creature, a wrinkle more or less is the sole difference between ye. . . And what is the society of which you boast? A mere chaos, in which all distinction of rank is lost – in a ridiculous affectation of ease, and every different order of beings is huddled together. In the same select party, you will often find the wife of a bishop and a sharper, of an earl and a fiddler. In short ’tis one universal masquerade, but where all assume the same disguise of dress and manners.

Touchwood exaggerates, of course, as he frets over the whole of society turning into one big masquerade. Indeed, far from ‘the same disguise’ the costume supervisor Miss Nicola Fitchett has fitted out the cast with a magnificent range of period dress. In the script (accessed 23.09.11), there is a whole page of instructions, a ‘flowered satin vest, silk stockings, pumps and latchets’ for Doricourt, ‘black shoes and paste buckles’ for Hardy, and a ‘white satin slip leno dress, trimmed with silver, white plume of feathers’ for lucky Letitia (the Belle with the Stratagem). Miss Fitchett seems to have followed these instructions in both letter and spirit, to create a wonderful set of costumes for the actors to inhabit in their diverse characters.

One of those productions worth seeing twice, and we’ve already got a couple more tickets for next Monday.