Elsewhere
Elsewhere
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by Mary Pix, directed by Jo Davies
Royal Shakespeare Company, Swan Theatre, Stratford-upon-Avon, GBR
April 3-June 16, 2018
Mrs. Rich: “Well, I am resolv'd; and, I will be a Countess, cost what it will”
The Royal Shakespeare Company has followed up its great success with Aphra Behn’s The Rover (1677) in 2016 with a delightful revival of an obscure play by an even less-known Restoration playwright – The Fantastic Follies of Mrs. Rich by Mary Pix (1666-1709). The RSC has given this zippier title to Pix’s play originally called The Beau Defeated; or, the Lucky Younger Brother. The Beau Defeated premiered in London in 1700, the same year as William Wycherley’s The Way of the World. Strangely, while Wycherley’s play was a great flop, Pix’s was a hit, yet it is PIx’s play that has been unjustly neglected. Pix’s plays is immensely funny, looks at the marriage game clearly from a woman’s point of view and has a middle-aged woman as its central character – all qualities that would make it a desirable contemporary play. To think that we have a play from 1700 like this should make us hope that the RSC’s revival will inspire interest in this play and Pix’s other comedies elsewhere.
In Mrs. Rich (as I shall call it) we know we are in a world much different from that of male Restoration playwrights in that woman hold the power in both the main plot and the subplot. In the main plot Mrs. Rich, the widow of a wealthy banker in London, is indignant because she is shunned by high society since she does not have a title. After one such insult at the very start of the play she vows, “I will be a Countess, cost what it will”. As it happens she does already have an aristocratic suitor, Sir John Roverhead (Tam Williams), a younger man who seems rather too preoccupied with his appearance.
The subplot focusses on Lady Landsworth (Daisy Badger), a young, wealthy widow and aristocrat, who is staying in London with Mrs. Rich, widow of her late husband’s banker. She is trying to find a husband who meets her long list of criteria for worthiness, one of its many requirement being virtue. The man she has found is the Younger Clerimont (Solomon Israel), a young brother left poverty-stricken by his father’s death, all his father’s land and money going to his elder brother. To test his virtue, Lady Landsworth poses as a high-level prostitute who claims to be in love with the Younger Clerimont. To her odd way of thinking, if he repulses her because of her profession she will know he is the right man for her. Thus Mrs. Rich tries to appear better than she is and Lady Landsworth worse.
Both Mrs. Rich and Lady Landsworth are independent because they are wealthy and both know, that unlike other women, they can do whatever they like because of it. Lady Landsworth knows that her wealth allows her to change the relation of men and women as wooer and wooed. As she tells Mrs. Rich’s maid Betty, “I am resolv'd to indulge my inclinations, and rather than not obtain the person I like, invert the order of nature, and pursue, tho' he flies”.
Mary Pix it aware that the freedom that Mrs. Rich and Lady Landsworth enjoy does not preclude the danger of being deceived just as men are. Mrs. Rich discovers that her name is on a list of women that Sir John Roverhead is wooing simultaneously while Lady Landsworth is the the object of a well intentioned plot by Younger Clerimont’s servant Jack (Will Brown) and his landlady Mrs. Fidget (Sadie Shimmin) to besmirch the Younger Clerimont’s character.
Fortunately for both women, there are people working behind the scenes to help each overcome the intrigues into which they have fallen. The maid Betty (Laura Elsworth) is the useful confidante to both women just as Belvoir (Greg Barnett) serves as a useful go-between. Mrs. Rich’s brother-in-law Mr. Rich (Michael Simkins) acts as her raisonneur as does Mrs. Clerimont (Jessica Turner) for both the Younger Clerimont and the Elder (Leo Wringer). Pix may satirize Mrs. Rich’s pretensions and social climbing and Lady Landsworth’s search for perfection in her mate, but her satire is not as biting and her worldview not as cynical as that of her male contemporaries and the whole comedy radiates a feeling of good humour and warmth that is much more like the comedies nearly 70 years later of Goldsmith and Sheridan.
The production is anchored by the absolutely hilarious performance of Sophie Stanton as Mrs. Rich. While she shows that Mrs. Rich is full of airs and pretensions, she also shows that the woman is still, at bottom, an alderman’s daughter. Rich changes from from one extravagant costume to the next but Stanton also indicates that Mrs. Rich is not above showing each new frock off to the audience with a pleased look that says, “What d’yer think o’ this?” Stanton plays her role in high comic fashion with perfect timing and can elicit laughter with simply a sudden change of expression or an eye-roll. Nevertheless, the key insight into Mrs. Rich’s character comes when she finds her name on the list that Sir Roverhead has kept of all his targets. Mrs. Rich has been ridiculing all the names until she comes to her own. Suddenly, the halting way Stanton reads it and the breaking of her voice gives us a glimpse at the injured, human being behind all the outer gaiety and gives the character a depth we would not have expected.
Daisy Badger’s Lady Landsworth at first seems like a lovely romantic heroine a century ahead of her time, but Badger shows us that there is strength and determination beneath Landsworth’s outer beauty and she knows more of the vices of the world than one might think. Like Mrs. Rich, she too has a moment of great disappointment, but this lead her into a wild argument with the Younger Clerimont that she soon regrets.
Mrs. Rich’s main object of passion is Sir John Roverhead played as an unctuously self-satisfied fop by Tam Williams. Williams makes us feel that that there is something seriously untrustworthy about Roverhead long before we discover what it is. In contrast, Solomon Israel paints a portrait of a depressed and despairing young man as the Younger Clerimont whose primary flaw is self-pity.
The follies of both Mrs. Rich and Lady Landsworth are countered by the eminent good sense of the maid Betty admirably played by Laura Elsworthy. Elsworthy brings off the important function of making us see that if the level-headed, good-humoured Betty can like so extravagant a person as Mrs. Rich, Mrs. Rich must have something about her that is deserving of Betty’s good will.
As for the Younger Clerimont, he is protected by both his devoted servant Jack and his landlady Mrs. Fidget. Will Brown his full of enthusiasm that balances the Younger Clerimont’s apathy while Sadie Shimmin’s lower-class smarts are a tonic to the highfaluting airs of both Mrs. Rich and Lady Landsworth. One of the funniest scenes in the play occurs when the Jack gets Mrs. Fidget drunk as they scheme how to win the unknown Lady Landsworth for Clerimont, Shimmin showing the increasingly debilitating effect of every drink.
Michael Simkins and Jessica Turner are both as clear speaking and clear headed as one would wish any raisonneurs to be. Unlike the raisonneurs in Molière, however, these two also take direct action and show that logic can create a much tighter trap to catch evil than evil can to catch folly.
Director Jo Davies has made the production feel like a kind of celebration. It begins with an all-female saxophone quartet accompanied by a harpsichord playing the greatest hits of the 18th century. The disconnect between the modern saxophone and its material is inherently amusing but it also delightful. The music overseen by Grant Olding is the perfect introduction to the mood of the play that is not topsy-turvy but rather enjoyably just out of kilter. Olding has written songs to add to the few that already exist in Pix’s text so that Sophie Stanton quite frequently turns from being acting the role of Mrs. Rich to becoming a music hall performer expounding on Mrs. Rich’s dilemmas. As with the spoken word, Stanton’s delivery is delicious.
Davies has also allows the fourth wall to broken so often is seems not really to be there. Betty addresses us directly and various characters to make a point will turn their speech straight towards individuals in the audience. Davies has done little to make Pix’s play more porto-feminist than it already is except by changing Toby, the gamekeeper of the Elder Clerimont, into a woman called Toni (Amanda Hadingue). Hadingue turns this into an hilarious figure whose ululating hallooing suggests that a woman’s zest for the hunt may be even greater than a man’s. Later Pix’s text depicts what may be the first-ever sword-fight on stage between two women who are not disguised as men. As Davies directs it, it is uproariously wild and amusingly degenerates into a fist-fight.
Such is the wild world of Mrs. Rich – full of folly, but also of exuberance, wit and heart. At the end of the show you shake your head in wonder that such a thoroughly delightful play should have languished in obscurity so long. That feeling, however, is tempered by the joy that the RSC has not only rediscovered it but has given it such an ebullient production. Let’s hope it travels to London after its run in Stratford.
©Christopher Hoile
Note: This review is a Stage Door exclusive.
Photos: (from top) Sophie Stanton as Mrs. Rich; Laura Elsworthy as betty and Daisy Badger as Lady Landsworth; Sadie Shimmin as Mrs. Fidget, Solomon Israel as Younger Clerimont and Will Brown as Jack. ©2018 Helen Maybanks.
For tickets, visit https://www.rsc.org.uk/whats-on/in/stratford/?from=ql.
2018-06-09
Stratford-upon-Avon, GBR: The Fantastic Follies of Mrs. Rich