The Colonel (play)

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Drawing of F. C. Burnand from Vanity Fair

The Colonel is a farce in three acts by F. C. Burnand based on Jean François Bayard's Le mari à la campagne, first produced in 1844 and produced in London in 1849 by Morris Barnett as The Serious Family.

The Colonel was first produced on February 2, 1881, and its initial run at the Prince of Wales’s Theatre lasted for 550 performances, an extraordinary run in those days.^[1] Simultaneously, a second company was touring the British provinces with the play. On 4 October 1881, The Colonel received a command performance before Queen Victoria (the first play to do so in twenty years (since the death of Prince Albert in 1861).^[2] The play transferred to the Imperial Theatre in 1883 and then to the new Prince of Wales Theatre in 1884, built by the producer of The Colonel, Edgar Bruce, from the profits from the comedy's extraordinary success.^[3] In July 1887, there was a revival at the Comedy Theatre.

1 Background
2 Roles and original cast
3 Notes
4 References
5 External links

[edit] Background

Theatrical poster from Punch shortly after the première of Patience and The Colonel.

The play, like the Bayard play on which it is based follows a Tartuffe-type plot: a wealthy family is infiltrated by a religious impostor who threatens to gain control over the family fortune until an old friend comes to the rescue – in this version, an American colonel, the title character of the play. A young husband generally uses the pretence of going to the country to escape his oppressive domestic circumstances. The old friend restores the husband’s supremacy in his home by pointing out to the misguided wife the dangers inherent in suppressing innocent and fashionable pleasures in the name of an exaggerated devotion. Burnand’s most important modification to this plot consisted in substituting "aesthetic" impostors for the religious hypocrites of the earlier versions.

Squire Bancroft, manager of the Haymarket Theatre had asked Burnand to create a new version of Bayard's story. Bancroft, however, decided not to stage the play, giving Burnand more license to freely adapt it. The "aesthetic craze," was an obvious target for Burnand, who had been a regular contributor to Punch since 1863 and had become its editor in 1880 (a position he held until 1906). The Observer noted that The Colonel came at a point when it “might, indeed, have been thought that Punch had well nigh played the subject out.”^[4] "The Colonel" was a recurring character in Punch.^[5] A mutual friend of Burnand and his rival, W. S. Gilbert, had leaked the information that Gilbert and Sullivan were working on an “æsthetic subject”, and so Burnand raced to produce the play before Gilbert and Sullivan's Patience opened.