Most assuredly, a vote for entertainment
By Bob Hicks
The late lamented Charlie Snowden, Mr. Scatter’s boss at the old Oregon Journal (a newspaper that died when the industry was healthy), was a man who appreciated a good joke but also had unyielding standards.
At his perch on the news desk, Charlie was known to lightly mock certain passages of flowery writing as he slashed through copy with his big black pencil. Sometimes he’d sigh or giggle and choose to overlook a phrase that not so privately drove him crazy: He knew which writers had permission to roam and which did not. But that didn’t stop him from pulling out his inkpad and his favorite stamp and branding the hard copy with his own gleeful judgment. The type was in a florid, immediately post-Gutenberg, barely readable old gothic. “WRETCHED EXCESS,” it said.
Ah, but what if the excess isn’t wretched?
That’s the sort of excess that courses through Dion Boucicault’s ramshackle 1841 comedy London Assurance, which recently enjoyed a sold-out revival at the National Theatre. That production was filmed live in London on June 28, before the show closed, and it was screened for Portland audiences twice on Saturday by Third Rail Repertory, which has an agreement with the National to show its filmed productions.
Mr. Scatter will argue that it is precisely the excesses in this calculated crowd-pleaser that make London Assurance work — and the firm command of excess on the part of the performers that steers it clear of wretchedness.
This sort of performance is an apparent contradiction that, when it’s pulled off, leads to delight. (And it doesn’t hurt that the form itself relieves the audience of the pressure and expectations of High Art, so it can relax and enjoy genuine popular art.) Actors love to go over the top. But unless it’s strictly controlled, going over the top topples the entire theatrical edifice. The trick is to be out of control and yet ruthlessly under control at the same time. To borrow a title from David Ives, it’s all in the timing. London Assurance is filled with what these days is referred to condescendingly as “bits” — actorly flourishes that are frankly artificial and exaggerated; calculated to garner laughter, cheap or not: sight gags. Only the best of comic actors have the rhythmic, musical, and ensemble sense to be overblown in precisely the right way, to steal a scene in a manner that makes the entire scene take off, to plant a sight gag early and just keep milking it until it becomes uncontrollably (or apparently uncontrollably) funny, to keep a scene rolling that on paper seems not to be going anywhere, to make an absolute virtue of utter triviality. What offends some observers about farce and its comic cousins is its mechanical qualities: It is meticulously calculated to produce certain effects. Yet when it works, the calculations are simply the structural craftsmanship that allows the whole thing to soar toward the ozone — and what gift is more appreciated or necessary than the gift of genuine laughter, of being allowed to escape one’s self for a couple of hours?
Readers will note that Mr. Scatter hasn’t written a word so far about the play’s plot. That’s not accidental. To a very large degree, it simply doesn’t matter. There is the question of a will, and a young gentlewoman’s need to marry wisely or risk penury (think Jane Austen), and a foolish old man with amorous pretensions (think Moliere) and a young adventurer brought to his senses (think Tom Jones), and a lot of stock characters (think Shakespeare and commedia dell’arte and most of European and American theatrical history), and several servants who are smarter and more wise to the ways of the world than their slightly dim-bulb masters (think Jeeves and Bertie Wooster, or Dilbert), and a half-hearted deus ex machina (think Restoration comedy). Boucicault wasn’t trying anything new. Like Andrew Lloyd Webber, he was exploiting his knowledge of the tried and true and squooshing them together with a pragmatic, postmodern (each for his particular time) sensibility.
An onlooker can roll her eyes at that, or she can choose to appreciate the author’s affection for the history of the theater. She can also choose to appreciate the irony that in terms of style, what goes around comes around. London Assurance is, in its own antique way, performance art. That is, it exists primarily not as a literary work of high merit but as a loose structure to show off its performers’ individual skills. Performance art rose in the past quarter-century partly as a reaction against the autocracy of the well-crafted script. Looked on as a radical departure, it was also in reality a return (modernized, to be sure) to the old virtues: the primacy of the performer in the performance. It was the old stage stars taking bows after speeches; bel canto singers with their superb control and individualistic flourishes; the old Russian ballet dancers with their athletic feats of prowess. Something basic is at work here. Look at me: Look what I can do.
Predictability isn’t necessarily a crime. There is something to be said for an author, director and performers being on the same page as their audience, playing around with familiar themes in ways that might still be fresh and revealing. Nicholas Hytner, who directed the National’s London Assurance, is simply one of the best in the business. And his cast, packed to the gills with actors who understand that a play is an open invitation to play, is a revelation. The great Fiona Shaw plays Lady Gay Spanker at a headstrong horsey gallop; Richard Briers is an addled wheeze as her husband Dolly Spanker; Michelle Terry is a sardonic anti-damsel-in-distress as the wryly named Grace, a bit like Emma Thompson as Beatrice in Much Ado About Nothing; Paul Ready as the lovestruck young Charles has a Hugh Grant-like blend of dash and diffidence; Nick Sampson, as the cynical valet Cool, is as cool as a caustic cucumber. But no one gets into the spirit of the thing quite so robustly as Simon Russell Beale, who plays the preening Sir Harcourt Courtly, Charles’s father and his rival for Grace’s affections (or at least, her willingness to wed). A man who has gone the way of way too much flesh, Sir Harcourt nonetheless thinks of himself as the figure of rakish youth, and Beale plays him as some sort of unlikely cross of Sir John Falstaff in glorious excess and Malvolio preening over his yellow garters in Twelfth Night. Make no mistake: London Assurance is not Twelfth Night, or anything approaching it. But Boucicault stole only from the best, and Hytner and his performers eagerly follow suit.
I wrote that London Assurance is like a 19th century version of performance art, but there is one key difference: performance art (and of course there are exceptions) isn’t much for comedy. Another difference: performance art is generally scripted by the performer, who plays a version of herself or himself: Like singer/songwriters, performance artists have no room for other peoples’ words.
So let me suggest where the spirit of London Assurance lives on: in situation comedies and dramadies, on your television screen. As much as arts aficionados put the forms down, many of the best pure performers in the business are the stars of these weekly romps through the maze of mundanity. They are Everyman and Everywoman, leading in exaggerated form the everyday lives that their audiences lead. They celebrate the sameness of civilization and its discontents, blustering and blundering through in their attempts to keep a bit of themselves against the forces of inevitability. The stories are usually negligible (in fact, being “relevant” can ruin them; think of the frequently sanctimonious All in the Family, or the platitudes of the television version of M*A*S*H compared to the genuine satire of its original movie version), and all too often just plain bad (they can’t all be Boston Legal or Frasier or, for that matter, The Honeymooners or Mayberry, R.F.D.). But those stock characters, who at their best break out of their stocks and create their own stamp of comic excess: they are utterly themselves, and they are also us. Candice Bergen, John Goodman, Charlie Sheen, Kelsey Grammer, William Shatner, Tim Allen, Tina Fey: they are our holy fools. Mr. Scatter has the feeling Dion Boucicault would be writing like a madman for them, if he were alive and kicking today.
*
ILLUSTRATION: Simon Russell Beale as Sir Harcourt Courtly in the National Theatre’s filmed version of “London Assurance.” Photo: Catherine Ashmore
July 19th, 2010 at 2:00 pm
Mr. Scatter promises not to make a habit of this, but … he has some outtakes from this post.
First, quoting director Nicholas Hytner, from his filmed conversation before the show began: “It’s a piece of gloriously talented hack work.” Pretty good summation: so gloriously talented that its hackery still amuses us. If Boucicault were less of a hack — that is, less thoroughly committed to the shifting dictates of the commercial theater of his time — he might fit in nicely with the likes of Ayckbourn and Stoppard, a pair of exquisite craftsmen who know how to be entertaining but also carry some artistic sting. You could call DB the Neil Simon of his day, but in commercial terms only: Simon, for better and for worse, has a distinct style; DB wrote pretty much whatever the market desired.
Some dialogue quotes I scribbled down as the film ran:
– Sir Harcourt, on his brief marriage: “She did 14 months with me, and then eloped with my best friend. And I miss him.”
– Sir Harcourt, again: “Permit me to hesitate for a moment.”
– The lawyer, sniffing around the country house for possible damages: “The trouble with my profession is that nine-tenths of lawyers give the rest of us a bad name.” (Polish the brass on that one and stick it up on the shelf alongside Shakespeare’s “The first thing let’s do, let’s kill all the lawyers.”)
I first saw “London Assurance” at the Oregon Shakespeare Festival in a 1984 production I’ve remembered fondly ever since, although when I put my mind to it I couldn’t remember any of the cast members. (Well, it HAD been 26 years!) Portland actor/director JoAnn Johnson, who was at Ashland at the time, did a little digging and came up with the cast list: William McKereghan as Sir Courtly, Mark Murphey as his son, Phil Davidson as Harkaway, Brenda Hubbard as the heroine Grace, Barry Kraft as the lawyer, Joan Hotchkiss as Lady Spanker and Phil Davidson as Dolly (Adolphus). Anyone else remember that production?
After seeing LA in Ashland I got interested in Boucicault and Victorian theater in general and discovered an excellent biography of Boucicault and his times. It’s called simply “Dion Boucicault: A Biography,” it’s by Richard Fawkes, Quartet Books, copyright 1979. If you’re interested, it’s worth hunting down. Among other things, Boucicault was a businessman in the P.T. Barnum mold, a cheerful opportunist who, like politicians before the advents of the video camera and the Internet, blithely reshaped their message for whatever audience they happened to be addressing. He wrote a play called “The Poor of New York” which was a big hit, so he took it on the road, renaming it at every stop for whatever town he happened to be in. After pretty much milking the poor of America, he took it back across the Atlantic, finally ending up with a big hit as “The Poor of London.”
One shakes one’s head, and can’t help but admire the sheer ballsiness of it all.
July 19th, 2010 at 4:40 pm
Bob, thanks for remembering those lines for the rest of us, who were too busy laughing to take notes.
Worthy of a dissertation in itself is the handling of the role of the moneylender Samuels in a way that not only removed the cringe factor, but literally (and in the best way possible) stopped the show — for both the characters on stage and the audience in the, um, audience. Admittedly, this was a directorial/casting flourish that was not part of the original. Hmm, wonder if something like that would work for Merchant of Venice? Nah.
July 20th, 2010 at 4:31 pm
George, an excellent point about the moneylender, Samuels. A clear case of humor that’s gone horribly wrong in the years since the play was written (and, let’s face it, must have offended at least some of the audience even when the play was new). Conflating “moneylender” and “Jew” and making that the entire punch line is an uneasy reminder of how casual ethnic putdowns were not so very long ago. I found myself even queasy about the substitution of a Chinese performer, a casting choice that made a joke about the joke. But at least it provided a role for an Asian actor, and you could argue that leaving this unsavory joke in the script (it’s entirely unessential and could easily have been snipped out) was a good way to place the play in its own time and remind the audience of what social conditions were in that time and place. This can be debated endlessly, and I imagine there were some pretty energetic discussions about it when the production was being assembled.
With “Merchant,” I think the shifting view of Shylock is what keeps the play fascinating. I know Jewish people who detest the play, and I have Jewish friends who find it compelling and important. It’s easy to forget a couple of things: (1) Shakespeare wrote it as a COMEDY, in which Shylock was the stock villain; (2) Shylock wasn’t originally the main character, although it’s impossible to think of him as anything other than that now. I’ve come to the tentative conclusion that the character of Shylock is prime evidence of Shakespeare’s genus: He wrote better than he was. That is, he no doubt shared the general biases of his time and place, but in creating Shylock, he thought so deeply about his character and motives that he succeeded in creating a man who would do nothing but gain sympathy as the centuries wore on. If we don’t grant Shylock the right to his pound of flesh, we understand completely the social conditions that led him to his fierce demand, and we identify to a startling degree with him. He emerges as the most real — maybe the ONLY real, or fully rounded — character in the play. “Merchant” lives on as a great piece of writing because anti-Semitism remains such an urgent and defining issue in our common history and contemporary lives; and because Shylock himself and the reaction of the larger culture to him speak so insightfully (and incitingly) to the nature of the problem. We hate, therefore we are.
July 20th, 2010 at 5:01 pm
Good points, Bob. Here’s my take on the Asian Samuels issue: We all know, as soon as we hear the name early in the play, that the money-lender is a Jew. Hundreds of years of convention and stereotyping tell us so, no matter how enlightened we think ourselves now. Yet when he finally makes his appearance late in the play, he’s so clearly not a Jew. Has to be someone clearly not a Jew, or the point (and the joke) is lost. Not so fast, buddy, this production tells us, thereupon throwing preconceived notion and perhaps a remnant of bias into our smug faces. The joke is on us, not on the character or his ethnic heritage. We laugh at the outrageousness of it, and because of the shock, we may remember in future days how we were caught and why.
I agree too with your assessment of Merchant. Shakespeare just couldn’t seem to write a stock character; had to keep throwing in all those levels of human complexity. It’s still tough sledding for this viewer, though, especially the ending. I wonder what you thought of the Eastern-European Merchant done at Portland Center Stage a few years ago. Couldn’t really be called a comedy, that one, and every character, as I recall, was worse than the next.
July 25th, 2010 at 9:03 am
George, I like your analysis of the Samuels casting.