<i>The Busy Body</i> and <i>Lovers’ Vows</i>

Audiences had welcome opportunities to see two outstandingly popular plays by eighteenth-century women dramatists and to enjoy the qualities that made the original productions so successful. The Busy Body (1709) by Susanna Centlivre (c. 1669–1723) was coproduced by Oxford’s Creation Theatre in partnership with the Orange Tree Theatre and the University of Oxford’s Cultural Programme. Lovers’ Vows (1798), adapted by Elizabeth Inchbald (1753–1821) from Das Kind der Liebe (The Love Child) by August von Kotzebue (1761–1819), was produced by the Historia Theatre Company, founded by Kate Glover with the aim of staging plays that take their inspiration from history. In this case, however, the play itself is history. Its established presence in canonical English literature must be reckoned with before any performance. The Jack Studio Theatre program mentions “at least six productions in Bath while Jane Austen was living there 1801–1806,” acknowledging its “huge role affecting the action and the lives of the characters” in Mansfield Park (1814), but declares that “The 250th anniversary of the birth of Jane Austen in 1775 is a happy coincidence.” The play was performed on its own terms, without any allusion to the ill-fated attempted production in Austen’s novel.Both productions successfully challenged Mrs. Norris’s opinion that “there is very little sense in a play without a curtain” (1, 349). They also managed without scenery a practice that the company at Mansfield Park would have been wise to emulate, since the scene painter they employed “spoiled the floor of one room, ruined all the coachman’s sponges, and made five of the under-servants idle and dissatisfied” (2, 36). Neither company included a set designer. In other respects, however, production styles differed widely. The cast of The Busy Body, directed by Gabriella Bird with the assistance of Esther Fernández Guerra, took full advantage of the structure of the Mordan Hall, which provided onstage and offstage entrance doors, a balcony, and opportunities to run around the back of the audience, who, seated in rows of chairs ranged on a level floor and sharing the same light as the performers, often found themselves surrounded by the action. The cast wore black modern dress, relieved by occasional grey or white, that served as a kind of uniform to distinguish them from the audience. Lovers’ Vows, in contrast, was performed in a black box theatre that provided a perfect setting for colorful period costumes, with the audience on raked seating in a darkened auditorium. Frequent scene changes, in settings as diverse as “An open Field,” “An apartment in the Castle,” and “A Prison,” were indicated with perfect success and economy by Edmund Sutton’s lighting and the sound design, all the more effective for its subtlety, created by Samantha Parry. The illusion was completed by the movement of a few props and small pieces of furniture, undertaken by the cast. Without a curtain, all onstage events are visible to the audience, including errors: at the performance under review, a cast member had to deal with a minor mishap with a scene change. To his eternal credit he stayed in character, admonishing his fellow shifter, “You’ve put on the wrong table,” as he helped to make the necessary adjustment, arousing sympathetic laughter from the audience.Contrasts in performance style reflected profound differences in the plays. With David Taylor as editor and advisor and Claire Rich as text consultant for The Busy Body, every effort was made to keep as true as possible to Centlivre’s script, but extra measures were taken to ensure that audiences who might be unfamiliar with the play could follow the action. The cast list in the program was based on Centlivre’s original dramatis personæ, but details were added about the characters’ situations, intentions, and incomes, as appropriate. The performance itself began with the characters introducing themselves to the audience: from Boadicea Ricketts’s seductive announcement of her thirty-thousand-pound fortune as Miranda to Sidonie McLaren’s businesslike listing of her servant roles, they all made it clear that metatheatricality was to be the order of the day. The fact that it was a script-in-hand performance contributed significantly to the effect: the scripts themselves featured as props, weapons, and temporary masks, and when actors found themselves in difficulties, which tend to arise in script-in-hand performances with brief rehearsal periods, remarks like “Now for some improvisation” or “I will read the script” added to the general hilarity.Robert Maskell as the greedy and tyrannical Sir Francis Gripe managed to appeal to the audience, conveying a level of physical desire that struck a fine balance between the comic and the pathetic. Ultimately, it was impossible not to feel a measure of sympathy for a character whose presence onstage always guaranteed laughter. Zak Ghazi-Torbati’s Marplot was a revelation. This character is desperate to discover other people’s business, especially that of his friend Charles, but is denied knowledge of their plots because they believe he will ruin them by his stupidity. At the play’s climax, however, the danger he presents to their schemes arises from the fact that they have not given him enough information. His obsessive curiosity, coupled with his apparent inability to develop schemes of his own, including his lack of romantic interest in women, makes him look like somebody who needs, as they say today, to “get a life.” Ghazi-Torbati, however, endowed Marplot with a level of sympathetic warmth and generosity appropriate to one of life’s givers. His ability to relish his own misfortunes and to draw the audience in to share his feelings energized the whole production.Complex plots are not the only problem presented by period drama: audience enjoyment can be diminished by failure to understand allusions that would have been transparently obvious when the play was first performed. A potential difficulty arises when Sir Jealous Traffick tells Marplot that if he finds out who is plotting against him, he will “equip him for the opera.” The 1709 audience would have instantly recognized the threat of castration and relished Marplot’s distress. But how effective is this line today, if delivered before an audience that might not be entirely composed of specialists in eighteenth-century studies? The solution was for Kevin Golding, playing Sir Jealous, to make a ferocious lunge towards the midriff of Marplot, whose falsetto shriek left no doubt as to the nature of the threat. Even the use of modern dress is a potential source of obscurity. When Centlivre’s original script required Sir George Airy to guard a door with a drawn sword, the dictates of twenty-first-century fashion (not to mention legislation) deprived the actor Patrick Fusco of the weapon that, as an eighteenth-century gentleman, the creator of the role would have worn; instead, he resourcefully extended his arm and clenched his fist. It made a powerful stage picture, telling the story with remorseless clarity.The experience provided by Lovers’ Vows was very different. In the darkened theatre, it would have been difficult to consult the program notes, which would in any case have given little help in following the plot, since they mentioned nothing about the characters’ motivation. Fortunately, there was no need, since the play was so easy to understand. The year before it premiered, a sign of changing theatrical taste appeared in the preface to The Busy Body in Bell’s British Theatre, vol. 16 (1797), defining it with some disapproval as an example of “Intriguing Drama—built upon chance-medley and situation, mistakes, closets, veils, balconies, old guardians, and young profligates, with a set of ladies who seem bound by no other laws than their inclinations” (Aiii). Lovers’ Vows is no comedy of intrigue, with characters deceiving others for their own advantage. Agatha, performed with a superb combination of pathos and dignity by Kate Glover, concealed her son’s parentage before the play begins, but her revelation that Baron Wildenhaim is his father drives its main action. Count Cassel, rendered suitably decadent by John Craggs, does not conceal his womanizing, since he does not realize that this will prevent the Baron from letting him marry his daughter Amelia. As for Amelia herself, she understands exactly why the virtuous Mr. Anhalt, restrained by his awareness of social distinctions and his sacred responsibilities as clergyman and tutor, is reluctant to declare his love for her: Emma Riches’s spirited performance admirably conveyed the skill and determination required to break down his anguished resistance, superbly portrayed by Edmund Digby-Jones. Meanwhile, Richard Ward as Cottager and Hilary Field as his wife ensured that the play was supplied with realistic humor, arising naturally from the characters’ situations. Finally, there is one vital question about any production of Lovers’ Vows to which all readers of Mansfield Park require an answer: The good news is that Harry Saks’s performance of Baron Wildenhaim, unlike that of Jane Austen’s John Yates, was entirely free from rant.