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

A second chance to see this great production. The post-show discussion with Jessica Swales and some of the cast brought home how odd it was that such a great play has languished in obscurity for so long, and how much of a risk was involved in putting it on. I’m glad Swales did take that risk, and put so much work into editing three scripts into one and gathering a cast (out of more than a thousand who applied) who could do it justice. Compensation for working for an actor’s wage was having an enormous amount of fun, both in character and as a bunch of people doing what they love. (One reason they don’t get paid so much is that people like us bulk buy using the Southwark Playhouse season ticket scheme. We bought four tickets and still only spent one-third of the cost of a single ticket for the Old Vic Richard III.)

In the masquerade, Mr Hardy disguises himself as a woman (after working through a list of more likely candidates). In the original, Swales said, Cowley has him in Jewish costume. This was one of the few changes she made, to keep us from getting distracted by a casual anti-semitism, and it was a good call, especially as Robin Soans made a fine dame (maybe angling for panto work?).

London, Big Ben-style chimes, Lincoln’s Inn, the whole cast teaming onto stage singing a ding-dong song. The stage clears, and a sweet-natured Saville and his servant, Dick, are met by the dastardly Courtall. Cowley has introduced two main characters, not rivals in Sheridan’s sense but holding rival principles: should a man conquer or commit to a woman? One is embodied by a fresh-faced Jeremy Joyce as the scrubbed Saville and the other by an urbane Marc Baylis as the man-about-town Courtall.

One of my ongoing fascinations is with Darwin’s dangerous idea, and with evolutionary thinking more broadly applied. While gender is a cultural construct with political implications (for example, we can decide that differently gendered individuals should be equal before the law), the two biological sexes are different in ways over which we have much less control, if any. Sex is not just about the bits you rub together, but about how you behave, the psychological strategies you employ in seeking reproductive opportunities. Cowley didn’t know about Darwin, of course, but if this play is anything to go by she did know about mating strategies, and those of Saville and Courtall are opposites ends of the gallant spectrum.

Cowley puts her drama first, and allows her characters and situations to entertain and not lecture us. Still, if you’ve been paying attention, by the end you may have learned something about the great drama that is human nature. At this point in the play, however, we can simply enjoy Courtall’s theatrical terror at the prospect of meeting his country cousins – all “rusticity, innocence and beauty” – and go along with his characterization of them:

COURTALL. Cousins of our days come up ladies, and with the knowledge they glean from magazines and pocket books, fine ladies; laugh at the bashfulness of their grandmothers, and boldly demand their entrees in the first circles.

This seems a remarkably modern complaint, and it’s about to be given a late-twentieth-century twist. First, we glimpse some hope for Courtall when he admits that his “conscience twitched” him, but we know that twitch will not hold back his libertine appetite. Then, Saville cries out – “there’s a bevy of female Patagonians coming down upon us” – and they exit to make way for four pairs of fluttering eyes and swishing petticoats. The rhetorical question they put is:

Shall I tell you what I want, what I really, really want?

And the answer they supply is: zig-a-zig-aah. One poor guy in the front row catches the eye of Cassandra Bond’s character, who is scarily stary and starry eyed as she bears down on him. Jackie Clune, who is taller and has – how to put this delicately? – slightly more bulk than her three co-stars,
has to lower herself a little in her Little Miss Muffett Dress, and lower her voice to deliver the immortal line:

If you really bug me I will say goodbye.

Given this character is the “gumby wench” (my wife’s phrase!), this is possibly the most terrifying interpretation of an upbeat song imaginable. A brilliant insertion of grrl into Georgian manners.

Michael Lindall sweeps in as the handsome Doricourt, except some of the sheen has been dulled by the morning’s business at Pleadwell’s.

SAVILLE. Did your heart leap or sink, when you beheld your mistress?
DORICOURT. Faith, neither one nor t’other: she’s a fine girl, as far as mere flesh and blood goes. But . . . nothing more.
SAVILLE. Is not that enough ?
DORICOURT. No! She should have spirit! Fire!

Doricourt anticipates heroes like D’Arcy, who demand more than just a pretty face, and Cowley is showing us how notions of decorum can backfire when it comes to love.

Cassandra Bond reappears as a worldly chicken-leg-eating maid, holding her palm out to a hack as he hands over one coin after another. Gossip is the real currency, of course, and Flutter is the chancellor of that particular exchequer. Villers marks him as one “who always remembers everything but the persons and the circumstances”. Christopher Logan’s superb Flutter scampers to and fro, not so much in the business of communicating information as making sure his camp presence is never absent for too long:

I never related a falsity in my life, unless I stumbled on it by mistake; and if it were otherwise, your dull matter-of-fact people are infinitely obliged to those warm imaginations which soar into fiction to amuse you; for, positively, the common events of this little dirty world are not worth talking about, unless you embellish them. . .