User:Bishonen/Casting Vanbrugh's Relapse
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Hey there! I've just glanced at The Relapse and it looks marvelous! You always do such a nice job. Sadly my education lacks much study in Restoration theatre so your articles are helping to fill the gaps. I did a quick check and did just find an article mentioning that The British National Theatre Company did a production of the play directed by Trevor Nunn in 2001. Here's the article and a review of that production. Hardly a random production! It appears to have had Brian Blessed (one of my personal favourites) in the cast. In addition, I also found that Patricia Routledge, known to American audiences as Hyacinth Bucket (that's "Bouquet", dear), was in Virtue in Danger. Here's a brief bio of the musical's librettist Paul Dehn that also includes a bit about the composer who also has a bio on the same site. But, alas, there is only a brief mention of the musical. There are little tidbits here and there on both the play and the musical. The Oxford Companion to the Theatre does provide a bit more information saying that the play in it's original form (not the Sheridan version) had a long run in London in 1947-48. It was revived by the Royal Shakespeare Company at the Aldwych Theatre in 1967. George Freedley and John Reeves' A History of the Theatre, 1967 ed. mentions a production at Canada's McGill University in 1960 directed by Harry Ritchie (whom I am not familar with). Of course there is Cyril Ritchard's revival in 1950 at New York's Morosco Theatre, he's mentioned in the first article and the Internet Broadway Database has a listing here. Here's a nice site on Ritchard. From the first article author's mention of this production, I would think it not minor at all. While the history appears spotty, there are some very nice productions that should be mentioned. I think that there is enough information here for at least a paragraph if not two. Of course it would mostly be name dropping. Sorry for the random order of this huge paragraph, I kept thinking of sources to check. I'll continue looking and post anything else that I find.
2001 article by Sheridan Morley. "In Trevor Nunn's rare, loving and brilliantly cast National Theatre revival of The Relapse, Alex Jennings superbly inherits the role of Lord Foppington which for 20 years or so belonged to Donald Sinden, and for another 20 before that to Cyril Ritchard."
21/07/01 by Michael Coveney in Daily Mail. "So shocking it led to an outburst of morality before its author was enshrined as a national eminence - he designed Castle Howard and Blenheim Palace and was the first knight on George I's accession - it is one of the wisest and wittiest comedies of grown-up sexual behaviour. And it has a classic character in Lord Foppington, the devotee of the playhouse and social gadfly who has just spent a thousand 'pawnds' to enter the 'House of Lards'. Alex Jennings comes on like a startled bewigged poodle, a coat like an iced cake and a fixed expression of gawping vacancy."
23/07/01 by Michael Billington in the Guardian. "The play has both a radical honesty and a theatrical vitality. Nunn and his designer Sue Blane seize on the latter by creating a false Restoration stage complete with chattering beaux in boxes and impressive backdrops of a Whitehall waterside and a rustic fortress. It gives visual unity to a restless play... But any revival depends on Lord Foppington, and this production gets a brilliant performance form Alex Jennings, who grasps the essential point that the character is both dressily effeminate and roguishly hetero."
Good external link on Virtue in Danger and Lock up Your Daughters.
Unfavourable 1963 review of Virtue in Danger by Alan Howard. Praises the cast, but complains that the production is "full of the simpering, posturing and sniggering which usually stand in for style and sophistication in Restoration revivals." This is also my reference for John Moffatt playing Lord Foppington.
The Relapse, or, Virtue in Danger is a Restoration comedy from 1696 by John Vanbrugh. It is a sequel to Colley Cibber's Love's Last Shift, or, Virtue Rewarded, in which a free-living Restoration rake is brought to repentance and reform by the ruses of his wife. In The Relapse, the rake succumbs again to temptation and has a new love affair. Like other playwrights at this time, Vanbrugh tailored his text to particular actors to emphasize his themes, in this case especially his cynical contrasts with Cibber's simple-minded story. Throughout 1696, such intentions were hampered and threatened by cutthroat competition for actors between London's two theatre companies, but eventually the efforts of Vanbrugh and the company manager Christopher Rich bore fruit in a thematically and financially successful première.
A mere six weeks after Vanbrugh had first watched Love's Last Shift performed by the Patent Company at Drury Lane in January 1696, he offered the first version of his sequel to the company, which made great efforts to stage it. The manager Rich hoped that a production of Vanbrugh's amusing play would save the threatened Patent Company, and eventually it did, but only after seven months of power plays by the actors, who had been long mistreated and were now suddenly empowered by the existence of the cooperative company. Some of the "seduction" and counter-seduction of actors has been reconstructed by modern scholars, notably Judith Milhous, from the records of the Lord Chamberlain's office and from Colley Cibber's autobiography. It must be noted, however, that actors were obscure people at this time. This is especially true of the actors remaining at the Patent Company after all the stars had decamped to the cooperative company; always excepting Colley Cibber, their birth dates are unknown and there is not a portrait in existence of any of them. John Vanbrugh, later a famous architect, was likewise an obscure young man in 1696. The personal dimension of these events, dependent on the evanescent lives and loyalties of the actors and the author, is largely unrecoverable.
Unlike Love's Last Shift, now a forgotten curiosity, Vanbrugh's Relapse has remained a stage classic.
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[edit] The London stage in the 1690s
[edit] One company
When the Puritan ban on public stage performance was lifted at the Restoration of the monarchy in 1660, two theatrical ventures, the King's Company and the Duke's Company, were created in London with Letters Patent from the stage-struck Charles II. The dynamic competition between the two companies was good for English drama and also good for actors, who could sell their fame and charisma to the highest bidder, and who emerged for the first time as public personalities. Both the drama and the actors lost out when the King's and the Duke's merged in 1682, forming the amalgamated United Company. Freed from the burden of keeping actors happy, now that they had nowhere else to go, the United Company soon curtailed their upstart power and influence, slashing salaries and perks. Apart from seasonal and nomadic entertainments such as summer fairs, professional London actors were now faced with a choice of going on the road with a "strolling" company, moving to the Dublin scene (see Theatre Royal, Dublin), or staying in London under the dictatorship of a monopoly employer. In the 1690s, the pinchpenny management of Christopher Rich brought disgruntlement among the actors to a head, and London playgoers were alarmed to see their favourite performers threatening to quit the stage.
[edit] Actors' rebellion 1694–95
The owners of the United Company, wrote Colley Cibber in his autobiography many years later, "who had made a monopoly of the stage, and consequently presumed they might impose what conditions they pleased upon their people, did not consider that they were all this while endeavouring to enslave a set of actors whom the public ... were inclined to support". Such popular performers as Thomas Betterton, the pathetic tragedienne Elizabeth Barry, and the comedienne Anne Bracegirdle commanded strong public sympathy. Barry and Bracegirdle had just scored a great hit with their tragic/comic heroine pair in Thomas Southerne's she-tragedy The Fatal Marriage (1694), while Betterton, active ever since the Restoration in 1660, was a living legend for his expressive powers and commanding stage presence. Betterton had for many years functioned as de facto director of the United Company's productions, as well as being a force in policy-making and day-to-day managing. In 1693, he was still helping the company owners quell a mutiny of actors, and to persuade/coerce striking colleagues into returning. However, when Christopher Rich turned over Betterton's own post as manager, with its attendant salary, to young Thomas Davenant, a mere puppet representing anonymous financial interests, Betterton himself prepared to leave.
In a "Petition of the Players", Betterton and his colleagues set forth the bad economic situation of the United Company and the plight of the actors. This unusual document was submitted to the Lord Chamberlain, the Earl of Dorset, in December 1694. It is signed by nine men and six women, all established professional actors, and details a disreputable jumble of secret investments and "farmed" shares, making the case that owner chicanery, rather than any failure of audience interest, was at the root of the company's financial problems. Underneath the humility of phrase which was customary in addressing the Lord Chamberlain, the petition sounds a note of professional pride: "All things are ordered at the will and pleasure of the present [owners], several [actors have been] turned out for no crime and without warning, and ignorant insufficient fellows put in their places... and treating us not as we were the King's and Queen's servants, but the [owners'] slaves" (quoted by Milhous).
Barely veiled strike threats in the actors' petition were met with an answering lockout threat from Christopher Rich in a "Reply of the Patentees", but the burgeoning conflict was pre-empted by a suspension of all play-acting from December 22 on account of Queen Mary's illness. The death of the Queen on December 28 extended the acting ban until Easter Monday, March 30, 1695, and during this interval, a cooperative actors' company took shape under the leadership of Thomas Betterton. The new company was granted a Royal "licence to act" on March 25, to the dismay of Rich, who saw the threat too late.
[edit] Two companies
The two companies which emerged from this labour/management conflict are usually known respectively as the "Patent Company" (the now dis-united United Company, which still held the two original Letters Patent of the Duke's and the King's Company) and "Betterton's Company", which Judith Milhous argues is quite a misleading term, as the actors' company was a true cooperative. The actors set up their enterprise with detailed paperwork for avoiding the arbitrary authority of which they had experience, documenting the shares in the company as well as the sickness and retirement benefits of both sharers and employees. Eight actors were originally full sharers, by virtue of the value of their particular reputation and skills, among them Betterton, Barry, and Bracegirdle.
The following couple of years were a period of intense rivalry between the two companies, in which each had distinct handicaps. The rebels had no theatre and no money, although they did have famous and charismatic actors; the Patent Company had few competent actors, but did command two fine playhouses (Drury Lane and Dorset Gardens) and even more importantly, capital. The Patent Company owners still believed in the ultimate value of their investment and were willing and able to run at a loss to get the enterprise back on its feet, in other words to kill the competition and recover the stars. "Seducing" actors (as the legal term was) back and forth between the companies was a key tactic in the ensuing struggle for position. So were appeals to the lord Chamberlain to issue injunctions against seductions from the other side, which that functionary was quite willing to do (see for instance the movements of John Verbruggen, detailed below). Rich later also resorted to hiring amateurs, and especially to tempting Irish actors over from Dublin. But such measures were not yet in place for the staging of The Relapse in 1696, Rich's most desperate venture.
[edit] Casting The Relapse
It was standard practice at this time for playwrights to tailor their texts to the talents and the thematic implications of particular actors, for example heightening or counterpointing a character or plot event by hinting at the actor's private reputation or theatrical "line". Vanbrugh clearly attempted to do this in The Relapse, and in spite of the nightmare of continuous emergency in which the production was mounted, most of his original intentions were eventually carried out. It is also argued by scholars of the period that the textual alterations he (probably) needed to make improved rather than depreciated the play. The November première was a great success, which saved the Patent Company from bankrupcy.
[edit] The two plays
Love's Last Shift is the story of a last "shift" or trick that a virtuous wife, Amanda, is driven to in order to reform and retain her out-of-control rakish husband Loveless. Loveless has been away for ten years, dividing his time between the brothel and the bottle, and no longer recognizes his wife when he returns to London. Acting the part of a high-class prostitute, Amanda inveigles Loveless into her luxurious house and treats him to the night of his dreams, confessing her true identity in the morning. Loveless is so impressed that he immediately becomes a reformed character. A minor part which was a great hit with the première audience is the fop Sir Novelty Fashion, written by Cibber for himself to play. Sir Novelty flirts with all the women, but is more interested in his own exquisite appearance and witticisms, and, writes Cibber modestly in his autobiography 45 years later, "was thought a good portrait of the foppery then in fashion". Love's Last Shift, combining as it did daring Restoration comedy sex scenes with sentimental reconciliations and with Sir Novelty's buffoonery, offered something for everybody, and was a great box-office hit.
Vanbrugh's The Relapse is less sentimental and more intellectual than Love's Last Shift, subjecting both the reformed husband and the virtuous wife to fresh temptations, and having them react with more psychological realism. Loveless falls for the vivacious young widow Berinthia, while Amanda only just succeeds in summoning her virtue to reject her admirer Worthy. The three central characters, Amanda, Loveless, and Sir Novelty, are the only ones that recur in both plays, the remainder of the Relapse characters being new creations. The cynical trickster subplot is also an independent creation by Vanbrugh, and enlarges the part of Sir Novelty to make more room for the already established roaring success of Cibber's fop acting. Vanbrugh's Sir Novelty buys himself a title and becomes "Lord Foppington". Even though his clever younger brother Tom "wins" the subplot by tricking him out of the country heiress Hoyden, Lord Foppington wins in the sense of never losing his aplomb. Modern critics consider Vanbrugh's Sir Novelty/Lord Foppington a great improvement on the original, "the greatest of all Restoration fops" (Dobrée), not merely laughable but also "brutal, evil, and smart" (Hume).
[edit] The Love's Last Shift cast
To cast Love's Last Shift in January 1696, the Patent Company had to make the best use of such actors as remained after the walkout, see cast list right. "The very beauty and vigour of the stage" had disappeared with the established actors, according to an anonymous contemporary pamphlet, leaving Rich's troupe in "a very despicable condition":
- "The disproportion was so great at parting, that it was almost impossible, in Drury Lane, to muster up a sufficient number to take in all the parts of any play; and of them so few were tolerable, that a play must of necessity be damned, that had not extraordinary favour from the audience" (Comparison Between the Two Stages, 1702).
Of the Patent Company troupe remaining at Drury Lane, only the Verbruggens, John and Susanna, were successful and well-regarded performers. John was cast as Loveless, the male lead, while his wife Susanna played a secondary character, the flirtatious heiress Narcissa. Susanna was a more high-profile and, the evidence suggests, simply a better actress than Jane Rogers; yet the character casting of both of them resulted in Rogers playing the more central role of Amanda, in accordance with her "line" of unflinching virtue. Out of all the Love's Last Shift cast, only the Verbruggens had probably been invited to join the rebels: the rest consisted of the new and untried (Hildebrand Horden, who had just joined the troupe, playing a rakish young lover), the widely disliked (the opportunist Colley Cibber, playing Sir Novelty Fashion), the modest and lacklustre (Jane Rogers, playing Amanda, and Mary Kent, playing Sir Novelty's kept woman Flareit). No doubt the rebels had left Betterton's only rival as male lead, George Powell, behind with some relief (Milhous); while Powell was considered skilled and experienced, he was notorious for his bad temper and alcoholism. He remained at Drury Lane, where he was ultimately not used for Love's Last Shift, but would instead spectacularly demonstrate his drinking problem at the première of The Relapse.
Out of the rest of Love's Last Shift cast, listed right, Johnson would be interestingly re-used in The Relapse; William Penkethman as a "pert" valet would be first rather unfortunately replaced in The Relapse by the more famous Thomas Doggett, then re-instated; and Hildebrand Horden, a rising young actor intended by Vanbrugh for the trickster part of Tom Fashion, would be dead. In a notable piece of emergency casting to replace Horden, Mary Kent would go from "kept woman" in Love's Last Shift to playing Tom as a breeches role in The Relapse.
[edit] The Relapse cast
Although Vanbrugh had only recently arrived in London, he seems to have made a point of quickly becoming acquainted with the acting resources of the Patent Company and of planning The Relapse round them. Loveless, Amanda, and Sir Novelty were naturally written for the actors that he and the rest of the audience had appreciated in those parts in Love's Last Shift, to reinforce the connection with the earlier play and capitalize on its unusual success. They were John Verbruggen, Jane Rogers, and Colley Cibber. Rogers, the virtuous wife, was thematically extremely important: a completely static personification of virtue in Love's Last Shift, and also in the perception of her private life, but not in The Relapse. Keeping Rogers as Amanda was fortunately hardly a problem, since she was not an actress that the companies fought over; she had remained with the Patent Company throughout, and probably had not even been invited to follow the rebels. Holding on to John Verbruggen and Colley Cibber, on the other hand, turned out to be one of Rich's greatest challenges, and the rest of the larage cast of The Relapse presented a varied palette of problems, including an untimely death.
[edit] The Verbruggens
John Verbruggen was one of the original rebels, and had been offered a share in the actors' company, but was disgruntled when his wife Susanna was merely offered a salary. This may have been the rebels' greatest tactical mistake, since Susanna Verbruggen, née Percival, formerly Mountfort, was a very popular and versatile comedienne, and John also had greater acting potential than had yet appeared. Getting both Susanna and John back into his depleted and unskilled troupe was a stroke of luck for Rich. It is not known how much Susanna was offered to return, but Rich doubled John's salary to sign a new contract, from £2 to £4 weekly, which put him on a level with George Powell. Still dissatisfied with his employment conditions, John got into an actual physical fight at the theatre (the Lord Chamberlain's injunction fails to make it clear who he fought with) in September 1696. This caused the Lord Chamberlain to declare the contract void and at the same time order John to stay with the Patent Company until January 1697, to give Rich time to find a replacement. The vital puzzle piece of the original Loveless was thus in place for an autumn season run of The Relapse. The loyal Verbruggen couple moving always as a unit, Susanna's services were also assured.
The Verbruggens were essential to Vanbrugh's intentions for several reasons. No commentary earlier than 1697 has survived on Verbruggen's acting skills, but they would flourish in the cooperative company and be sometimes compared with the great (and aging) Betterton's. Verbruggen was considered a more natural actor, with "a negligent agreeable wildness in his action and his mien, which became him well" (the anonymous The Laureat (1740), quoted in Biographical Dictionary of Actors). Anthony Aston contrasted Verbruggenh's wild, untaught talents with Betterton's artfulness, and vividly described him as "a little in-kneed, which gave him a shambling gait, which was a carelessness, and became him" (1748, quoted in Biographical Dictionary of Actors). In The Relapse as published, Loveless does not appear as very irresistible, but Vanbrugh wrote the part for Verbruggen and was thus able to count on his nonchalant male magnetism to enrich the character. This would originally have worked even in print, since cast lists were included in the published plays: most play readers were playgoers also, and well aware of the high-profile Verbruggens. When the merry widow Berinthia (=Susanna) sighs "I don't wonder his wife is so fond of him", the Restoration reader would usually know why she thought so, and also note the meta-joke that Berinthia was herself "his wife" in real life.
[edit] Hildebrand Horden and Mary Kent
Vanbrugh must have planned to make use Hildebrand Horden, who had played Young Worthy in Love's Last Shift (see Holland). Horden was inexperienced, but he was the only young, handsome potential romantic lead Rich had, and was popular especially with the female spectator segment. There is no record of Vanbrugh's plans for Horden, but he was the obvious, indeed only available, practical choice for Tom Fashion, Lord Foppington's tricksy younger brother. It was a blow to the Patent Company when Horden was killed in a tavern brawl (more glamorously referred to as "a duel" in older sources) in May 1696. Thematically, the most interesting aspect of this tragedy is the emergency casting it forced: at the November première, Tom Fashion was played as a breeches role by Mary Kent. It is not recorded if Vanbrugh made any changes in the text between May and November to accommodate the casting change. As Holland points out, it puts a different face on the uniquely frank homosexual scenes, where Tom keeps skipping nimbly out of the way of the matchmaker Coupler's lecherous groping, and ends up promising Coupler to "take possession" later, in exchange for help in his heiress-hunting.
[edit] Colley Cibber
Colley Cibber was a rather unsuccessful young actor at the time of the split, and with none of the physical attractiveness of the soon-to-be-dead Horden. Cibber had "wisely" stayed behind at the Patent Company where the competion was less keen (Biographical Dictionary). After the success of Love's Last Shift, his status was totally different, and he used his newfound power over Rich with initiative and daring.
[edit] Other actors
George Powell, "Miss Cross"
Some things in the scanty records remain stubbornly inexplicable, perhaps from personal circumstances irrecoverable by posterity. There is no obvious reason why William Penkethman, a popular and well-liked funnyman, should have stayed behind, or "Miss Cross", the young girl who played Hoyden in The Relapse. Miss Cross is likely to be Laetitia Cross, an actress who was briefly the mistress of Peter the Great, Tsar of Russia, during the latter's stay in London between January and April 1698.
Vanbrugh's preface to the play preserves a single fleeting fact about the première performance: George Powell was drunk.
- One word more about the bawdy, and I have done. I own the first night this thing was acted, some indecencies had like to have happened, but it was not my fault.
- The fine gentleman of the play,drinking his mistress's health in Nantes brandy from six in the morning to the time he waddled upon the stage in the evening, had toasted himself up to such a pitch of vigour, I confess I once gave Amanda for gone.
[edit] Notes
- ↑ Assuming that Vanbrugh's statement in the prologue that his play was "got, conceived and born in six weeks' space" is a correct description. There is room for doubt, since the culture put a premium on the ability to dash off literary compositions with little time and effort.
- ↑ Highfill, entry "Colley Cibber".
[edit] References
- Cibber, Colley (first published 1740, ed. Robert Lowe, 1889). An Apology for the Life of Colley Cibber, vol.1, vol 2. London.
- Dobrée, Bonamy (1927). Introduction to The Complete Works of Sir John Vanbrugh, vol. 1. Bloomsbury: The Nonesuch Press.
- Highfill, Philip Jr, Burnim, Kalman A., and Langhans, Edward (1973–93). Biographical Dictionary of Actors, Actresses, Musicians, Dancers, Managers and Other Stage Personnel in London, 1660–1800. 16 volumes. Carbondale, Illinois: Southern Illinois University Press. Where not otherwise indicated, all information on individual actors above is taken from their entries in this work. Passages quoted directly from it are footnoted.
- Hume, Robert D. (1976). The Development of English Drama in the Late Seventeenth Century. Oxford: Clarendon Press.
- Milhous, Judith (1979). Thomas Betterton and the Management of Lincoln's Inn Fields 1695—1708. Carbondale, Illinois: Southern Illinois University Press.
- Van Lennep, William (ed.) (1965). The London Stage 1660—1800: A Calendar of Plays, Entertainments & Afterpieces Together with Casts, Box-Receipts and Contemporary Comment Compiled From the Playbills, Newspapers and Theatrical Diaries of the Period, Part 1: 1660-1700. Carbondale, Illinois: Southern Illinois University Press.
