Ahead of the class
Stratford’s She Stoops to Conquer surprises with a return to its roots, and warms with its comedy
If I appear to be obsessing over the opening sequences of the productions at this year’s Stratford Festival, it’s because Stratford itself seems to be obsessive about them. Nearly every show so far has come with some kind of apocryphal, or semi-apocryphal, prologue. Hamlet kicks off with the protagonist, as in a nightmare, confronting what I took to be the invading army of Norway, though a colleague believes that the people bearing down on the Danish prince are actually the mourners at his father’s funeral. The Taming of the Shrew begins, as it should, with what some critics insist on describing as “the play’s rarely staged Induction” though I’ve never seen a production that didn’t include it in some form. The form this time is an adapted and updated one in which most of the actors play themselves. The Diary of Anne Frank, not a play that one would expect to have much in common with the Shrew, starts in a surprisingly similar way, the cast lining up to tell us their real names and what they think about the story to come. Pericles retains its opening Chorus, but jettisons the character who usually speaks it; instead his lines, here and later, are parcelled out among all the performers. Even Carousel, though it still begins with the orchestra playing the eponymous Waltz, starts the accompanying action in the mill rather than in the fairground: a change that is becoming canonical and is certainly an improvement.
Another opening, another show. She Stoops to Conquer, directed by Martha Henry, also has an unexpected introduction but this time the surprise comes, not from the director’s departing from the text, but from her returning to it. When it was first performed in 1773, Oliver Goldsmith’s comedy came, as was the custom at the time, with a prologue and epilogue, contributed by friends of the author rather than by the man himself. In this production, most unusually, we get to hear them — somewhat trimmed and altered but still there. David Garrick, the greatest actor of the time and also a dab hand at the rhyming couplet, wrote the prologue: a mock-apology for the play’s abandonment of the sentimental vogue for comedy that makes you cry in favour of the great tradition of comedy that makes you laugh. It’s delivered here, with a fitting air of tipsy trepidation, by the promising young actor André Morin. He returns at the end for the epilogue, with an equally fitting air of tipsy triumph, though most of this is spoken by another promising young actor, Karack Osborn, who has earned his final spotlight.
He has been playing — actually, at the finale, is still playing — Tony Lumpkin, the country scapegrace who initiates the comic action by sending a couple of gentlemanly travellers to his stepfather’s house, having told them that it’s an inn. He seemed rather hesitant and scrambled at his first appearance, but he’s grown steadily through the night, becoming very funny and placing an especially rewarding emphasis on Tony’s essential good nature, on his fits of the sulks whenever he feels it’s being taken advantage of, and on the energy with which he springs into action when people are nice to him again. He’s also one of the very few Lumpkins who looks as if he might be the right age, which is around 21, depending on whom you ask; his fond mother, for what she insists are benevolent reasons, has been keeping it from him.
There’s love in this as well as vanity, and Lucy Peacock, acting with discreet abandon, makes both feelings credible. As her spouse, the unwitting innkeeper, Joseph Ziegler supplies the perfect image of hospitable benevolence fighting and finally losing an internal battle with apoplectic fury. The joke of course is that he really is expecting his two visitors as guests, but not as paying ones. One of them is the young man whom he intends for his daughter Kate, she who stoops and conquers. Maev Beaty confirms in this role the long-standing suspicion that she is the classical comedienne of her generation, wittily and charmingly in command of everything she says and does. Her suitor Marlow is, at least where women are concerned, a split personality, cripplingly shy with women of his own class, confident and predatory with those below it. Brad Hodder’s is another performance that takes time to find its rhythm — his initial boorishness seems tentative and hence overdone — but he ripens; taking Kate first for a barmaid, then for a poor relation, he gives an intriguingly neurotic edge to his insistence that the ladies know him as their “agreeable Rattle”; there’s agony beneath his boasting, and a corresponding humiliation when he discovers his mistake. She, both amused and concerned, has to rescue him. In fact he stoops, she conquers.
A great surprise of the production is that its secondary couple, usually the dull foils to the principals, emerge here as possibly funnier though not as richly comic. Their storyline has less wit but more gags. Sara Farb, in her best performance to date, makes Kate’s cousin Constance imperiously flighty, as one who has read too many three-volume novels. Tyrone Savage makes Hastings, her lover and Marlow’s travelling companion, a decent cross between fine gentleman and fortune-hunter; the protracted confusions over Constance’s jewels have more than usual urgency. She has been marked out by her aunt Mrs. Hardcastle to be her son Tony’s bride, though the two cannot stand one another; with amusing perversity, their animosity makes them allies. The action of this play, compared with that of its Restoration predecessors is very neatly folded together, and Henry’s production makes the most of it. She also has good characterful fun with Mr. Hardcastle’s servants, promoted from stables and farm to wait at table and very confused about it. The prologue turns out to be justified; this is comedy that makes you laugh. It also warms you.
She Stoops to Conquer is in repertory through Oct. 10 at the Avon Theatre, Stratford