This is a review of the 2003 National Theatre/ Out of Joint co-production of this classic play as performed at the Theatre Royal Bath and filmed to be presented on Digital Theatre.
Jason Watkins, playing the rather minor part of Diggory, managed to incorporate the warning about mobile phones into the (newly written) rhyming prologue!
It’s a classic farce. Mr Hardcastle has arranged for his daughter Kate to marry his best mate’s son, Charles Marlow, although he has heard that Marlow is rather bashful with the ladies.
Marlow and his friend Hastings (who wants to elope with Kate’s cousin Constance) lose their way and arrive at a nearby inn where Tony Lumpkin, Mr Hardcastle’s stepson, is carousing. Tony sees the opportunity for playing a prank and directs the weary travellers to Mr Hardcastle’s house which he tells them is another inn, with available rooms. So when they arrive, they treat Mr H as an innkeeper, which he finds impertinent in his guests.
When Marlow first meets Kate he is so bashful that he stammers and cannot even look at her. But when she realises the misapprehension he is under, she resolves to change her dress and her voice and pretend to be a barmaid. He can woo lower class ladies! (This play isn’t exactly PC but it was written in 1773 when England still had her American colonies!) Mr H catches sight of how Marlow is behaving and thinks him even more impertinent.
Now the subplot swings into action. Constance won’t elope with Hastings without her jewels, her fortune, which are kept ‘safe’ by Mrs Hardcastle (who wants Constance to marry Tony to keep the money in the family but Tony actually has his heart set on a local girl). So Tony arranges to steal the jewels and gives them to Hastings who entrusts them to Marlow telling him to put them in the post-chaise but Marlow thinks that a carriage standing outside what he still believes is an inn is not a safe place for a box of jewels so he persuades Diggory to entrust them to Mrs H who, having lost them, is persuaded that it was merely an error of the servants. Mrs H learns about the planned elopement and bustles Constance into the carriage to get her away from the house but Tony drives it in a circle so after forty miles they return to the garden at night and Mrs H falls into a pond and mistakes her husband for a highwayman.
Obviously all is sorted out by the end.
It’s a very funny script and it was brilliantly acted, including some exchanges with the audience (one was asked to taste the punch that Mr Hardcastle had made, another to check the letter that Mrs H was reading, from time to time one of the actors broke the fourth wall to speak, or just looking meaningfully, directly at the audience).
It starred Monica Dolan as Kate (she was Jo Hamilton in Mr Bates and the Post Office and is now Nicky Branson in Sherwood’s second series), Christopher Staines as Charles Marlow, Ian Redford as Mr Hardcastle, Jane Wood as Mrs Hardcastle, and Stephen Beresford (who wrote Pride and was the partner of Andrew Scott - one of the stars of Pride - between 2001 and 2016) as the suave Mr Hastings. They were all brilliant.
I have also read this play: reviewed here.
Comments
Post a Comment