Sweethearts (play)

From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia

For the Victor Herbert musical of the same name, see Sweethearts (musical)

Sweethearts is a comic play billed as a "dramatic contrast" in two acts by W. S. Gilbert. It was first produced on November 7, 1874 at the Prince of Wales's Theatre in London.

The first professional production of Sweethearts in Britain in recent memory was given in the spring of 2007 at the Finborough Theatre in London, along with a rare professional production of Sullivan's The Zoo.^[1]

Contents 1 Background 2 Roles 3 Synopsis 4 Notes 5 References 6 External links

[edit] Background

This romantic comedy of manners was written for Squire Bancroft and his wife Marie (nee Wilton), managers of the Prince of Wales's Theatre, and starred Mrs. Bancroft. The Bancrofts had produced the best plays of Tom Robertson in the 1860s, and Sweethearts was Gilbert's tribute to Robertson's "realist" style. The importance of small incidents is emphasized, characters are revealed through "small talk", and what is left unsaid in the script are as important to the play as what is said in the dialogue. These are all Robertson trademarks, though they are not key features of Gilbert's other plays. However, the play combines sentiment with a typically Gilbertian sense of irony. The story of the play deals with themes as diverse as the differences between men's and women's recollections of romantic episodes, and the spread of housing developments to green-field sites. Squire Bancroft called Sweethearts "one of the most charming and successful plays we ever produced," and the play was still produced through at least the 1920s.^[2]

Early in his career, Gilbert experimented with his dramatic style. After a number of broad comedies, farces and burlesques, he wrote a series of short comic operas for the German-Reeds at the Gallery of Illustration. At the same time, he created several 'fairy comedies' at the Haymarket Theatre, including The Palace of Truth (1870) and Pygmalion and Galatea, one of seven plays that he produced in 1871.^[3] These works, as well as another series that included The Wicked World (1873), Sweethearts, Charity (1874), and Broken Hearts (1875), established that Gilbert's capabilities extended far beyond burlesque, won him artistic credentials, and demonstrated that he was a writer of wide range, as comfortable with human drama as with farcical humour.^[4] The success of these plays gave Gilbert a prestige that would be crucial to his later collaboration with as respected a musician as Sullivan.

1874 was a busy year for Gilbert. He illustrated The Piccadilly Annual; supervised a revival of Pygmalion and Galatea; and, besides Sweethearts, he wrote Rosencrantz and Guildenstern, a parody of Hamlet; Charity, a play about the redemption of a fallen woman; a dramatisation of Ought We to Visit Her? (a novel by Annie Edwardes), an adaptation from the French, Committed for Trial, another adaptation from the French called The Blue-Legged Lady, and Topsyturveydom, a comic opera. He also wrote a Bab-illustrated story called "The Story of a Twelfth Cake" for the Graphic Christmas number.

A drawing room ballad of the same name was created in 1875 to help advertise the play, based on the story-line of the play, with music by the composer who would go on to become Gilbert's most famous collaborator, Arthur Sullivan. It is one of only three Gilbert and Sullivan songs that were not part of a larger work.

[edit] Roles

• Mr. Harry Spreadbow (Age 21 in Act I; Age 51 in Act II)
• Wilcox, a Gardener
• Miss Jenny Northcott (Age 18 in Act I; Age 48 in Act II)
• Ruth, a Maidservant

[edit] Synopsis

Act I – 1844

A stiff Victorian youth, Henry Spreadbrow, has been suddenly called away to India and must leave immediately. He visits his childhood friend, a delicate if spirited young woman, Jenny Northcott, who is busy in her garden. Henry summons the courage to propose marriage to her, but Jenny is flirtatious and capricious, and frustrates his every overture, letting him know that she does not care for him. He asks her to give him a flower to remember her by, and he gives her a flower in return, which she puts to one side without seeming to care about it. At last, dejected, he leaves, but then she bursts into tears.

Act II – 1874

Jenny, still single, lives in the same house, though the garden has grown much in thirty years. Henry, now Sir Henry Spreadbrow, returns, and when they meet again, the full nature of the irony reveals itself: Jenny has remained faithful to him all those thirty years and remembers their last meeting in every detail. But Henry had recovered from his passion for her within the month and has forgotten most of the details of their meeting. Jenny has kept the flower he gave her, while Henry had long ago lost the flower she gave him. "How like a woman!" says Sir Henry, to throw aside the flower and then keep it for thirty years; "How like a man!" Jenny retorts, to swear undying love and then forget almost immediately. As the curtain falls, however, Henry makes it clear that their romance is only just beginning.

[edit] Notes

[edit] References

• Goldberg, Isaac, The Story of Gilbert and Sullivan (1929)
• Sweethearts libretto and plot summary at the Gilbert and Sullivan archive
• Crowther, Andrew (2000). Contradiction Contradicted – The Plays of W. S. Gilbert. Associated University Presses. ISBN 0-8386-3839-2. 
• Stedman, Jane W. (1996). W. S. Gilbert, A Classic Victorian & His Theatre. Oxford University Press. ISBN 0-19-816174-3. 

[edit] External links

• Article discussing the garden setting of the play and other plays
• Information about the first modern professional production