Elsewhere
Elsewhere
✭✭✭✩✩
by Thomas Middleton, directed by Jenny Eastop
Mercurius, The Rose Playhouse
March 3-28, 2015
Allwit: “I thank him, h'as maintained my house this ten years,
Not only keeps my wife, but 'a keeps me”
One of the advantages of travelling to London is that one can find one theatre company or another theatre engaged in presenting a play by one of Shakespeare’s contemporaries, a circumstance that is far too rare in North America. While the new Sam Wanamaker Playhouse represents a standing commitment to those plays, its presence has not prevented other companies from pursuing their own vision of Shakespeare’s contemporaries, sans candlelight and period instruments.
One such new company is Mercurius founded in 2012 by Jenny Eastop that has already produced rarities such as A Trick to Catch the Old One (1605) by Thomas Middleton (1580-1627). This month Mercurius is presenting another Middleton, A Chaste Maid in Cheapside (c. 1613), a play that has been called the best of that Jacobean sub-genre, the city comedy. Mercurius’ production is a pleasure and a frustration at once – a pleasure because the play is so well acted, a frustration because it has been abridged by about an hour with a running time of only 90 minutes. Those 90 minutes do provide an enticing overview of the play but they do leave one wishing one could have seen the entire work as Middleton wrote it.
The plot, actually an ingenious combination of plots, focusses on Moll Yellowhammer (Beth Eyre), the chaste maid of the title, and her fiancé, the odious Sir Walter Whorehound (Andrew Seddon). The goldsmith Yellowhammer (Stephen Good), Moll’s father, thinks that the marriage will be financially advantageous for his daughter, unaware that Whorehound has no money and wants to marry Moll because of her large dowry. Yellowhammer is also unaware of how fully Whorehound lives up to his name. Besides having two grown children from one of his mistresses, Whorehound has entered into a bizarre arrangement with the man Allwit (Timothy Harker), who is only too happy that Whorehound is having an affair with his wife and fathering children with her.
Allwit, like Yellowhammer, is under the misapprehension that Whorehound is extraordinarily rich. In fact, Whorehound has been living off money borrowed against a fortune he thinks he is sure to inherit. The only way he can fail to inherit is if his relatives Sir Oliver Kix (Fergus Leathem) and Lady Kix (Alana Ross) produce an heir. But after seven years of marriage the couple remains childless.
It so happens, however, that a man named Touchwood Senior (Richard Reed), has had to separate from his wife because he is so virile that his wife has produced so many babies they can no longer afford the upkeep. When he meets the Kixes, who will pay anything for a remedy for their childlessness, he says he has a special potion that will cure impotence and another that will cure barrenness. Touchwood Senior will have to administer the cure for barrenness to Lady Kix in private.
Meanwhile, as is typical in comedy, Moll is in love with the poor but virtuous young man, Touchwood Junior (Harry Russell), who happens to be Touchwood Senior’s younger brother. After one failed attempt of Touchwood Junior’s to steal Moll away from home and marry her, Yellowhammer has increased his guard on her.
Many questions arise: How will Touchwood Junior and Moll ever get together? Will Yellowhammer ever become aware of Whorehound’s vice? Will Lord and Lady Kix ever have a child and thus foil Whorehound’s hopes of inheritance?
Middleton’s comedy is both daring and disturbing in treating a topic that Shakespeare never broaches – namely, the manner in which people regard children as commodities. Shakespeare’s view of children is always sentimental and the attempt to kill as child as in King John, Richard III or Macbeth marks the lowest point to which a person can sink. Yet, Middleton is both aware that children cost money to raise and that they are means of securing inheritances. In Middleton’s dark vision of city life in London, one that looks forward to Charles Dickens, adults value children not for their innocence but for how much money they can bring in.
One might think that all this is quite enough plot, but there is a fourth plot that Eastop has omitted perhaps to simplify the play or perhaps because adding it would require two more actors. Middleton, who is an expert at creating parallel plots, includes in the original play a parallel for Moll’s engagement to Whorehound. In this plot, Moll’s brother Tim is set to marry Whorehound’s wealthy landed niece from Wales (both are spoken of but do not appear in Eastop’s version). As it turns out, the woman is not Whorehound’s niece at all, but just one of his mistresses.
This fourth plot is important for more than its parallelism. In the play as Mercurius presents it, Whorehound does nothing that the affected parties disapprove of. Allwit is happy that Whorehound sleeps with his wife and Yellowhammer is happy that Whorehound will marry Moll. The plot with Tim and the Welshwoman, however, is our main evidence that Whorehound is not merely a man of lax morals but, in fact, actively plans to deceive Yellowhammer and his son. Without this plot, we don’t see the full extent of Whorehound's villainy.
Nevertheless, this flaw aside, Eastop has given the play such lively direction, one can only wonder why such an ingenious and darkly comic play has been so scandalously neglected, especially in North America. She draws fine performances from nearly the entire cast. Principal among these is Timothy Harker, incredibly making his professional debut as Allwit. Harker captures Allwit’s horrifyingly distasteful glee perfectly in his long monologue extolling the joys of cuckoldry – not having to procreate, raise children or keep a wife – indeed, praising a kind of laziness that extends to basic societal functions. He makes Allwit’s worldview both funny and frightening at once.
Also excellent is Stephen Good as Yellowhammer, who fully conveys the goldsmith’s muleheaded conviction that his opinions only can be right. Richard Reed makes a smoothly convincing Touchwood Senior and Harry Russell an ardent Touchwood Junior. Fergus Leathem and Alana Ross are quite amusing as the unhappy Kixes, who alternately fight and make up throughout the play. Importantly, the two make clear that the root of the Kixes’s incessant bickering stems from the sadness of childlessness that always weighs heavily on their minds. It is this sense of underlying melancholy that helps make them the most sympathetic couple in the play next to Moll and Touchwood Junior.
Beth Eyre shows Moll to be nearly defeated by her father’s idée fixe about Whorehound and by the hopelessness of ever joining her true love. Josephine Liptrott makes Maudlin, Moll’s mother, such a memorably comic figure one wishes Middleton had made her part larger. The one disappointment is Andrew Seddon in the central role as Whorehound. He looks absolutely right for the part, but he is alone in making little sense of Middleton’s verse or in displaying the character’s various levels of duplicity. Least understandable is why he shows no sign of being wounded late in the play which is his key motive for renouncing Allwit and his wife.
The Rose Playhouse is an archeological site and the playing area does not consist of the remains of the theatre itself, which is outlined in red rope lights, but of the 12x20-foot viewing deck that seats about 70 in a shallow C-shaped formation. Eastop uses the three entrances to this space quite inventively, with almost every entrance through the audience coming as a surprise. Eastop makes her cleverest use of the site when the Middleton calls for a chase along the Thames with Yellowhammer and Whorehound pursuing Moll and Touchwood Junior. The centre of the site is naturally filled with water, so when the chase ranges to the far side of the site away from the viewing platform, we see the actors reflected in the water in the centre. This adds to the naturalism of the scene and to the gloom that is its conclusion.
Eastop and designer Sarah Andrews have updated the setting from the 1610s to the 1950s. This is a good period to chose when marriage and having children where held as necessities of a full life. Strangely, though, the soundtrack that has been chosen is too generic and does not include ‘50s songs that would reinforce that theme like “Love and Marriage”, “Band of Gold” or “Chapel of Love”.
Those who do not know the play will find it an exciting discovery informed with a very contemporary frankness about human behaviour. They may wonder why so many characters like Tim, Moll’s maid or Allwit’s wife are so often referred to but never seen, yet will not fail to find the play an enjoyable experience. Those who do know the play will naturally regret the omission of one of its key plots, but that regret will be tempered with the pleasure of seeing this undeserved rarity performed with such verve and enthusiasm. I hope Mercurius will have a production on when next I am in London.
©Christopher Hoile
Note: This review is a Stage Door exclusive.
Photos: (from top) Stephen Good as Yellowhammer, Beth Eyre as Moll and Harry Russell as Touchwood Junior; Timothy Harker as Allwit and Andrew Seddon as Sir Walter Whorehound. ©2015 Bethany Blake.
For tickets, visit www.rosetheatre.org.uk.
2015-03-09
London, GBR: A Chaste Maid in Cheapside