The only time I had ever seen The Beaux’ Stratagembefore was in a knockout version in London starring a young Maggie Smith way back in January 1970. I suppose I can understand why this long, messy, expensive, early 18th century offbeat comedy is seldom produced in our time and has had very few major productions on this side of the Atlantic. It requires a half-dozen leading actors and a very large supporting cast, an elaborate staging with period costumes and changing sets, music, dancing and sword-fights. It has licentious behavior, vulgar language, attacks on conventional morality and religion, shifting plots and behaviors and social satire. And yet virtually all its characters, including thieves, bullies and attempted murderers, get sentimental conclusions and decided affection.
Some of it is hard to follow; all of it is difficult to perform well. So I’d better admit here that it is a play that I absolutely love. I could not be happier with this splendid Stratford production.
George Farquhar wrote The Beaux’ Stratagem on his deathbed, dying at 29, just three nights after it opened. Referred to as the last great Restoration Comedy playwright, he did, indeed, create witty reflections of such comic characters and give them caricatured names such as Squire Sullen, Archer and Aimwell, and Lady Bountiful. But even the most beloved examples of late, more humanized, satirical characters from that genre – such as The Way of the World’s Mirabel and Millamant – are not seen with the affection that Farquhar lavishes on even his most mean-spirited characters, like Squire Sullen, whose distaste for his wife and mother-in-law fuels the play’s extraordinary plea for divorce. How this play’s delicious humor and infectious goodwill could have sprung from an impoverished young man painfully dying as he wrote it boggles the mind. His two heroes are thieves: well-born but without sufficient funds and far too lazy and immoral to work, they pretend to credentials and fortunes that they do not have in order to win wealthy wives or sweethearts whom they can rob. Farquhar wanted Archer and Aimwell to be dashing and adorable; and Colm Feore and Mike Shara infuse their riotous slapstick carrying-on with swashbuckling glamor. And Feore eloquently makes the then-revolutionary case for legal divorce.
The brilliantly independent, beautiful Mrs. Sullen comes to starry life in one of Lucy Peacock’s richest creations. Romping through a series of giggle-causing frump roles in recent seasons, Ms. Peacock here turns back the clock and plays Mrs. Sullen with triumphant charm and glamour. Scott Wentworth – recently a great Tevya and Shylock -- is almost unrecognizable but so funny that he is somehow winning as the lecherous but misogynistic Squire Sullen. Bethany Jillard is a slyly funny ingénue as Dorinda. Martha Henry combines a persuasive belief in her goofy claims to be a kind of faith healer with a classic comic dowager command to make perhaps more of Lady Bountiful than Farquhar did. And about 20 more bring the struggling, celebrating folk to exuberant life. I’ve remarked that Stratford Artistic director Antoni Cimolino doesn’t give himself easy assignments, and this is yet another triumphant venture: a complicated, huge-scale production full of joy, fun, and serious thought – all invisibly controlled. Patrick Clark’s period designs are handsome and charming. Robert Thompson’s lighting is, as always, evocative and emotionally dead-on. And it is a real pleasure to have Berthold Carriere, my favorite theatrical musical director anywhere, returning to compose the beautiful music and direct the rich-sounding orchestra.
This is another Stratford production that I’d hope would get filmed and recorded.
