Improving Hannah Cowley

Photo: Jane Hobson.

2011, in London at least, has turned out to be a good year for – of all things – eighteenth-century drama.

Mind you, it only takes three productions to make it a good year for eighteenth-century drama: The Beggar’s Opera at the Open Air Theatre in Regent’s Park, The Rivals at the Barbican and now, in a more courageous move, The Belle’s Stratagem by Hannah Cowley at the Southwark Playhouse (smartly tucked away under a railway near London Bridge).

Cowley’s comedy of 1780 is a lively variation on Goldsmith’s She Stoops To Conquer, in which the English heroine, Letitia Hardy, is promised in marriage to a young man called Doricourt, who comes back from the Continent in love with Continental sophistication and convinced that no Englishwoman could possibly match it. Letitia’s “stratagem” is intended to prove him wrong, hilarity ensues, etc.

The Southwark production has been well received. The theatre critics have praised its considerable charms, and called it well conceived, or even unmissable. And if the “perfunctory” sub-plot is disappointing, there is some consolation in a fine supporting turn by Christopher Logan, the Kenneth Williams de nos jours. There are equally fine turns from Gina Beck (as Letitia), Robin Soans (as the belle’s father), Maggie Steed and Jackie Clune (these last two forming a mischievous and witty double act), among others – as well as some exuberant musical moments, good, clear direction by Jessica Swale and high production values.

It’s a pity that a couple of critics have repeated the misinformation (from a rogue press release?) that the original production of the play was closed down by Richard Brinsley Sheridan. From memory, I’d say that’s unlikely, as Sheridan was playwright-manager of the Theatre Royal, Drury Lane at the time, and The Belle’s Stratagem was first staged at Covent Garden. So this may be one of those convincing myths (with a famous name attached, and hints of jealousy and sexism) that unfortunately gets repeated into truth . . . .

But the other thing the critics seem to have missed was actually on stage. The fourth act of The Belle’s Stratagem is dominated by a masquerade, through which weave most of the play’s characters in disguise, as the occasion demands. Cowley has Letitia’s father rather ineffectually attempting to meddle in her cunning plans for teaching Doricourt a lesson, by disguising himself as “cunning little Isaac” – ie, as Isaac Mendoza, a character in Sheridan’s highly popular comic opera The Duenna. The meta-theatrical in-joke for Cowley’s audience was that Letitia’s father was played by John Quick, the short comic actor who also played Mendoza. When it came to the Belle’s Stratagem masquerade, Quick would therefore be borrowing a (perfectly fitting) costume from himself.

In the current revival, however, Letitia’s father Mr Hardy decides to go to the masquerade as a fine lady. There aren’t really any “hilarious consequences” to this, as Mr Hardy’s role in the scene is fairly small, but cutting “little Isaac” from the masquerade also means cutting lines directed at him by his fellow masqueraders, such as “Why, thou testy little Israelite!” and “Look at this dumpling Jew!”.

Presumably, it was thought, a modern audience would be more comfortable with the cross-dressing. And it’s thematically justified by the play’s forthright commentary on male assumptions about how women should behave. But it means that in one significant respect, this isn’t The Belle’s Stratagem familiar to late eighteenth-century audiences.

I don’t mean to suggest that theatre-makers now should respect play-texts by not altering them at all – on the contrary, The Belle’s Stratagem at Southwark shows how a revival can also be a sensitive adaptation of the original. But why so silent about it? (There is no note about it in the programme.) Would it spoil the production’s claim to be a landmark rediscovery?

Comments

[Jessica Swale]

A response from the director:

What a fascinating article, and how unusual to have a commentary written by someone who has read the play.

As the director of The Belle's Stratagem, I can happily explain my edits, and I am thrilled that anyone takes an interest in these decisions. We have now played to several thousand audience members and I am sure less than a dozen were familiar with the play, from the interval conversations and post show discussions we have had.

This is the third Georgian play I have directed (after Sheridan's School for Scandal and The Rivals), yet unlike the former two, The Belle's Stratagem has been excluded from the contemporary canon; the last professional production in the UK was in 1888. I suspect this is partly due to producers lack of willingness to take the risk on an unknown play, alongside the lack of any decent published script of the play (several versions exist but either in the original typeface which is difficult to read, or in collections of obscure 18th Century plays which, it seems, are now out of print). It is a sad state of affairs in the arts that risk-taking like this is rarely an option. For the record we staged this play without any formal funding, fundraising through every means possible to raise enough capital to stage a play we thought was well worth reviving.

It is no secret that many theatre makers edit plays slightly. Three simple reasons, we want them to be palatable, comprehensible and suitable for a commuting audience, whose last trains are at 11pm. I edited Belle heavily, and am glad I did so, as the original reads at 2 1/2 hours, and our production, with additional music and dances, is an hour shorter. This is one of the constraints we are used to.

I first read The Belle's Stratagem a year ago and instantly fell for it. However, as is so often the case with older texts, there were many elements which make it less palatable for modern audience. The script we are using is one I constructed from three extant scripts, a process which involved creating a new script together line by line from those which exist, often in order to choose the funniest lines and the most poignant imagery. For example, in two of the three versions, the gossip Villers, reads a book on Lapland to fill time whilst he waits for Mrs Rackett to finish at her toilette. In one version he begins by sharing the book he reads with the audience;

'What have we here? ‘The Authentic History of Lapland.’ Oh that may be dipped into, for the mind quarrels not with romance in Lapland. Brrr!'

In another, the scene begins much later, and he remarks to another character:

'I have been on a voyage to the North Pole since she has been at her toilette. A lady at her toilette is as difficult to be moved as a Quaker.'

In our version I used both, to make the most of the joke. In the third version, not only does he not say the lines, but his character does not exist. So as I hope will be obvious, it is often not a question of 'leave in or out', but a matter of selecting one of a multiplicity of options or creating a hybrid from what is available.

With the consideration of time in mind, I cut 8,000 words from my original draft (28,000). So in fact there are far more significant edits than the decision to shift Hardy's fancy dress from a Jew to a woman, a decision made in order to support the theme of the play (the cunning woman) and to avoid causing offence.

In my eyes, this edit was no more significant than the decision to remove the narrative elements about the war (the original play explores the effect of the American revolution and colonisation on London), to shift lines in order to equalise parts- for comedy value in the case of Mrs Rackett and her sidekick Miss Ogle, or to put on stage the country cousins, a comic 'bevy of female patagonians' who pursue one of the characters to London in a desperate search for husbands... in the script they are mentioned but never appear; in our production these singing cousins are the equivalent of a Georgian girl band.

Part of the joy of directing is deciding which elements of a story to emphasise; often it is too much to pursue all thematic elements, so I chose to focus on the theme of womens' roles. My initial interest in the play stemmed from the brilliance of the female parts, particularly roles for older actresses, which Cowley writes with such panache. Had the focus been split between this and a multiplicity of other themes I suspect our interpretation would have been muddied.

I sincerely hope that now other companies will stage this play, and perhaps they will choose to give it a different slant. I should have liked to discuss all the editorial decisions in the programme, but being limited to four pages of information about the play, I decided that contextual background would be of more use and interest to the majority of audience members.

My aim as a director is ultimately to serve the play and to honour the author's intentions, which I think, in Cowley's place, we can guess at with some certainty. She was most certainly forward thinking; at a time when women had no more legal rights than slaves, her Mrs Rackett speaks out in defence of 'fine women':

'A fine lady is a creature for whom nature has done much, and education more; she has taste, elegance, spirit, understanding. In her manner she is free, in her morals nice. She is undistinguishingly polite to her husband and all mankind. In a word, a fine lady is the life of conversation, the spirit of society, the joy of the public!'

Hannah Cowley, I am pretty sure, was very a fine lady and it has been hugely gratifying that we have had such a wonderful response to her work. I sincerely hope it now returns to its rightful place on the repertoire.