The Admirable Crichton at the Shaw Festival

We found J. M. Barrie’s The Admirable Crichton, now playing at the Shaw Festival (Niagara-on-the-Lake, Ontario), so clever and delightful in every detail that we’ll see it again if we can. We haven’t enjoyed ourselves so much at the theater in a long time.

Nicole Underhay as Lady Mary Lasenby, David Schurmann as Lord Loam, and Steven Sutcliffe as Crichton

Crichton (pronounced “CRY-ton”) is a 30-year-old butler in the high-toned Mayfair household of the Earl of Loam (David Schurmann), described by the playwright in the printed version of the play as “a widower, a philanthropist, and a peer of advanced ideas.” One of Lord Loam’s ideas is that class differences are artificial, and he has decreed that, once a month, all the servants in his house must take tea in the drawing-room with him and his family as guests and equals. These social events are dreaded not only by Lord Loam’s three daughters, but also by the servants. Crichton, who as butler is head of the servants’ hall, finds them excruciating:

ERNEST: Do you know, Crichton, I think that with an effort you might look even happier. (Crichton smiles wanly.) You don’t approve of his lordship’s compelling his servants to be his equals — once a month?

CRICHTON: It is not for me, sir, to disapprove of his lordship’s Radical views.

ERNEST: Certainly not. And, after all, it is only once a month that he is affable to you.

CRICHTON: On all other days of the month, sir, his lordship’s treatment of us is everything that could be desired.

Lord Loam’s daughters know how profoundly uncomfortable Crichton is with this charade of equality:

LADY MARY (sarcastically): How Crichton enjoys it!

LORD LOAM (frowning): He is the only one who doesn’t; pitiful creature.

CRICHTON: I can’t help being a Conservative, my lord.

LORD LOAM: Be a man, Crichton. You are the same flesh and blood as myself.

CRICHTON (in pain): Oh, my lord!

Under pressure, Crichton reluctantly explains his distaste for “equality” to Lady Mary:

CRICHTON: My lady, I am the son of a butler and a lady’s-maid — perhaps the happiest of all combinations; and to me the most beautiful thing in the world is a haughty, aristocratic English house, with every one kept in his place. Though I were equal to your ladyship, where would be the pleasure to me? It would be counterbalanced by the pain of feeling that Thomas and John were equal to me.

Steven Sutcliffe as Crichton and Nicole Underhay as Lady Mary Lasenby

A few days after the “servants’ tea,” Lord Loam and his family leave on a private yacht for an extended voyage to the South Seas. Crichton suggests a kitchen maid, Tweeny, as ladies’ maid on the yacht for Lady Mary and her sisters, and Crichton himself is persuaded to go along as Lord Loam’s valet.

Two months later, the entire party is shipwrecked on a deserted island in the South Pacific, where it becomes immediately clear that Crichton is the only one of the Londoners with survival skills. Indeed, Crichton finds himself in his element, able, intelligent, and masterful. He disabuses his erstwhile superiors of the notion that they can continue to be idle on the island, and as “nature” takes its course, their roles are reversed: Crichton becomes a benevolent, respected master of a smoothly run island establishment, and the others, who call him “the Gov.” (which is how the servants back in London referred among themselves to Lord Loam), become his servants.

Ready to fend off a wild beast on the island

Nature also takes course in the form of a blossoming romance between Crichton and Lord Loam’s eldest daughter, Lady Mary (who in the new “natural” order of things has been rechristened “Polly”, just as household servants in London households were given arbitrary new names by their superiors). After two years on the island, none of the party expects to be see London again. The sight of a ship forces the issue of what must happen to their relationships if they were to be rescued and restored to Mayfair.

In this show, every touch from director Morris Panych is golden; every minute a dozen small things tickle your fancy. It all works: the narration, the costuming, the songs, the singing animals (Panych’s idea, not Barrie’s), the little bits of pantomime business, the vanity of Ernest, who annoys everyone with his epigrams. The narration is taken directly from J. M. Barrie’s stage directions (reading his plays in print is a treat). The animals sing clever arrangements of swing tunes from the 1920s in close harmony. The “servants’ tea” scene in the opening act is comic genius. Panych’s material is superb, as Barrie’s characters are fully drawn and brilliantly colored, and Panych has given this show all the sauciness and scope of a well-directed musical.

David Schurmann as The Earl of Loam and Marla McLean as Tweeny

What’s priceless, though, is the way this superb cast delivers Barrie’s lines. No better Crichton could have been found anywhere than Steven Sutcliffe. He is as commanding on the stage as a Mayfair butler as he is as the buff, masterful “Gov.” on the island. The diminutive Marla McLean is an arresting and remarkably convincing Tweeny. David Schurmann, a world-class Shavian actor, plays the naïve and ineffectual Lord Loam. We were especially glad to see the ravishing Nicole Underhay back at the Shaw Festival.  Her transformation from a bored, jaded Londoner to an exuberant, accomplished island-dweller is something to see.

Crichton is a marvelous character, and he’d probably be better-known today if The Admirable Crichton hadn’t been overshadowed by the the popularity of Peter Pan, and if P. G. Wodehouse had not created Jeeves, who since the 1920s has been by far the best-known fictional member of the English serving classes. Jeeves was not strictly speaking a butler; he was a gentleman’s gentleman, serving Bertie Wooster as valet, personal secretary, butler, and jack of all trades. Still, Jeeves and Crichton have a lot in common as polished, intelligent, well-read masters of their own domains.

We think Wodehouse, a man of the theater who happened to be one of J. M. Barrie’s cricket pals, surely had Crichton as one of his models when he brought Jeeves into being. Early in The Admirable Crichton, for instance, we learn that Crichton has an ulterior motive for promoting Tweeny as a maid for Lady Mary and her sisters on the yacht:  the promotion will elevate Tweeny’s social status and make her a more eligible mate for himself.

CRICHTON (after hesitating): There is in this establishment, your ladyship, a young woman –

LADY MARY: Yes?

CRICHTON: A young woman, on whom I have for some time cast an eye.

CATHERINE (eagerly). Do you mean as a possible lady’s maid?

CRICHTON: I had thought of her, my lady, in another connection.

LADY MARY: Ah!

We thought immediately of Jeeves. In story after story, as Wodehouse devotees know, Jeeves manipulates his employer to his will, whether to inveigle Bertie Wooster into taking a vacation in the country (so Jeeves can go fishing), to further a romantic scheme of Jeeves’s, or to tighten his control over Bertie’s selection of ties and dinner jackets. Like Jeeves, Crichton manages to further both his employer’s needs and his own personal wishes at the same time.

And who can doubt that the title of Wodehouse’s first great collection of Jeeves stories, The Inimitable Jeeves, echoes the title of The Admirable Crichton?

The two essays in the Shaw Festival’s program for The Admirable Crichton, by Mr. Panych and Michael Billington, claim to find egalitarian socio-political overtones in the play; Mr. Billington says it has “subversive implications.”  We don’t see it at all.  J. M. Barrie was a romantic, not a socialist, and we’ve never detected any political agenda in his novels and plays. Indeed, if anything political can be extracted from The Admirable Crichton, it would be the fundamentally conservative notion that class distinctions aren’t the bastard offspring of leftist bogeymen like imperialism, feudalism, and capitalism, but arise naturally in every society.

But Barrie did have, along with the similarly apolitical P. G. Wodehouse, a genuine sympathy for and interest in servants as human beings. The Admirable Crichton includes an exquisite portrait of the social distinctions between different kinds of servants in large English establishments. Consider what we learn when Tweeny is interrogated by Lady Mary as a possible lady’s maid for the voyage:

LADY MARY: And you and Crichton are — ah — keeping company?

(CRICHTON draws himself up.)

TWEENY (aghast): A butler don’t keep company, my lady.

LADY MARY (indifferently): Does he not?

CRICHTON: No, your ladyship, we butlers may — (he makes a gesture with his arms) — but we do not keep company.

AGATHA: I know what it is; you are engaged?

(TWEENY looks longingly at CRICHTON.)

CRICHTON: Certainly not, my lady. The utmost I can say at present is that I have cast a favourable eye.

Another great English dramatist, by contrast, had no interest in servants as people. Many of Emsworth’s readers will recall the exchange between Algernon and his butler Lane in the opening scene of Oscar Wilde’s The Importance of Being Earnest:

ALGERNON: Why is it that at a bachelor’s establishment the servants invariably drink the champagne? I ask merely for information.

LANE: I attribute it to the superior quality of the wine, sir. I have often observed that in married households the champagne is rarely of a first-rate brand.

ALGERNON: Good heavens! Is marriage so demoralising as that?

LANE: I believe it is a very pleasant state, sir. I have had very little experience of it myself up to the present. I have only been married once. That was in consequence of a misunderstanding between myself and a young person.

ALGERNON (languidly): I don’t know that I am much interested in your family life, Lane.

LANE: No, sir; it is not a very interesting subject. I never think of it myself.

But Wodehouse and Barrie do find servants interesting. In “Jeeves in the Springtime,” Jeeves speaks to his employer about his own personal life with the same delicacy and reserve as Crichton. Asked how he knows that Bingo Little’s uncle lives in Pounceby Gardens, Jeeves tells Bertie Wooster, who is narrating the story,

“I am on terms of some intimacy with the elder Mr. Little’s cook, sir. In fact, there is an understanding.”

[Bertie narrates:] I’m bound to say that this gave me a bit of a start. Somehow I’d never thought of Jeeves going in for that sort of thing.

“Do you mean you’re engaged?”

“It may be said to amount to that, sir.”

“Well, well!”

The stories of P. G. Wodehouse owe much of their interest to the cooks, butlers, valets, gardeners, secretaries, and pig-keepers who populate the country estates of Lord Emsworth and Bertie Wooster’s relatives.

J. M. Barrie, one of Emsworth’s favorite writers, was a elegant English prose stylist who can fairly be mentioned in the same breath as Wodehouse and Evelyn Waugh. The Admirable Crichton first appeared in 1902, two years before Peter Pan. The play is less fantastical than Barrie’s Peter Pan, and also much lighter — we’re remembering the dark, wonderful Peter Pan at the Shaw Festival in 2001.

To those who appreciate this production of The Admirable Crichton, we recommend not only the reading editions of J. M. Barrie’s plays, but also Barrie’s novels, like A Window in Thrums and The Little White Bird. We hope fervently that the Shaw Festival will be doing more Barrie plays over the next few seasons.

An Ideal Husband at the Shaw Festival

Lord Goring (Steven Sutcliffe) with the woman whose wiles he frustrates (Mrs. Cheveley, played by Moya O'Connell) and the woman he loves (Mabel Chiltern, played by Marla McLean)

Oscar Wilde’s An Ideal Husband seems to us to have a bipolar quality.  Its main plot is heavy stuff: everyone thinks the world of Sir Robert Chiltern, but a dark secret haunts him. As a poor young man in the British foreign office, he made his fortune by selling a state secret to a speculator, and now he’s being blackmailed. His idealistic wife will despise him if he gives in, but he’ll lose his reputation and his career if he doesn’t.

But the play is also a comedy about what Lady Chiltern calls the “beautiful idiots and brilliant lunatics” that compose London society. Chief among them is Lord Goring, a dandy who devotes himself to clever conversation, opera, and the perfect boutonniere. He flirts throughout the play with Sir Robert’s sister Mabel, with whom he is on the precipice of becoming engaged, and spars with his father, Lord Caversham, who thinks he is a wastrel.

Patrick Galligan as Sir Robert Chiltern is blackmailed by Moya O'Connell as Mrs. Cheveley

So while parts of the play are farce (a taste of what would make Wilde’s The Importance of Being Earnest, written a year or so later, such a delight), the rest is dramatic tragedy. In this excellent production the contrast is sometimes startling. The second act, for example, ends in full drama mode with a long, impassioned speech from Lord Chiltern (Patrick Galligan) about his predicament.  But the third act (right after intermission) picks up with a comic exchange between Lord Goring (Steven Sutcliffe) and his manservant Phipps (Anthony Bekenn) that could also have been played by Algernon and his manservant Lane in The Importance of Being Earnest. Only in the final scene do the farce and the drama finally intersect, as the villainess, Mrs. Cheveley (Moya O’Connell), is stymied and the truth comes out about Lady Chiltern’s much-misunderstood note, “I want you. I trust you. I am coming to you.”

Mortal enemies: Mrs. Cheveley (Moya O'Connell) and Lady Gertrude Chiltern (Catherine McGregor)

This is the best “An Ideal Husband” we’ve seen.  Jackie Maxwell gives equal attention to telling the story and to showing off Wilde’s glittering repartee. The dramatic main plot is so grave that a director could be tempted to downplay the comedy. Not so here; every outrageous epigram is milked for full effect.

Lord Arthur Goring (Steven Sutcliffe) in all his decadence

There isn’t a weak performance in this show; it’s an awfully good cast. We thoroughly enjoyed Steven Sutcliffe, as Lord Arthur Goring, and his backhanded courtship of Marla McLean, as Mabel Chiltern. Mr. Sutcliffe’s performance helped us understand something we hadn’t quite seen before: by the time he wrote An Ideal Husband in 1893, Oscar Wilde badly wanted his public to understand that there was more to him than the “dandy” image he had cultivated over the years, and that despite his reputation for frivolity and pleasure-seeking he was a man of principle.

That is, Wilde wanted people to see — through Lord Goring, who stands in for the playwright — that he’d grown up. Wilde still gives Lord Goring many of the best comic lines of the play, like this exchange with his father (Lorne Kennedy):

Lord Caversham: I don’t know how you stand society. A lot of damned nobodies talking about nothing.
Lord Arthur Goring: I love talking about nothing, Father. It’s the only thing I know anything about.

But he also gives Lord Goring a speech that would grace any soap opera, one so melodramatic as to be laughable — except that for once Wilde does not want us to laugh:

You came here tonight to talk of love, you whose lips desecrated the word love, you to whom the thing is a book closely sealed, went this afternoon to the house of one of the most noble and gentle women in the world to degrade her husband in her eyes, to try and kill her love for him, to put poison in her heart, and bitterness in her life, to break her idol, and, it may be, spoil her soul. That I cannot forgive you.

And in the end he makes Lord Goring the moral center of the play, the character who tells his friend Lord Chiltern that his philosophy of power is “a thoroughly shallow creed.” When Lord Chiltern describes Baron Arnheim as a man of “culture, charm, and distinction,” Lord Goring calls the Baron a “damned scoundrel.” In this show, Mr. Sutcliffe delivers one-liners and pronounces moral judgments with equal pungency.

Mrs. Cheveley (Moya O'Connell) fails to convince Lord Goring (Steven Sutcliffe) that he's the only man she's ever loved

We weren’t enthusiastic about the non-period, jungle-gym-style set in this show, which certainly didn’t give much of a sense of the opulent London townhouses in which the play is set. But we did get a charge out of some of the extravagant costumes, like the outlandish dressing gown Lord Goring wears during the late-night visits to his apartment by Lord Caversham and Mrs. Chevely and the attention-grabbing dresses of Mrs. Cheveley and young Mabel Chiltern.

We arrived at the Festival Theater in time to catch a fine pre-show talk about the life and times of Oscar Wilde by the Shaw Festival’s Autumn Smith, who was assistant director for this play.

We preview the Shaw Festival’s 2010 season

The poster for the original stage production of One Touch of Venus, the only musical on the 2010 playbill

We enjoy the challenge of trying to figure out what’s really going on at the Shaw Festival from the official clues. To our eyes, the 2010 schedule of plays shows that the Shaw is shifting direction, possibly because of the glum report that Shaw Festival theaters were only 63.5 percent full in 2009, down from 70 percent in 2008.

But we still like the 2010 lineup. We’ll begin with the shows we’re most looking forward to and end with a couple we may skip.

1. The Women (Clare Boothe Luce). Emsworth takes credit for this one. A year ago, reviewing the dreadful Hollywood version of The Women, we broadly hinted that this play was way overdue at the Shaw Festival (last seen in 1985, when Nora McClellan played the much-abused Mary Haines).  To the Shaw Festival: Thanks for taking requests! 

Clare Boothe Luce, a successful playwright during the 1930s, a Republican congresswoman in the 1940s

The Women is on our short list of the finest plays of the twentieth century, a tale of ruthless, catty, insecure society women behaving in beastly ways to one another, a play liable to make you quirm in discomfort and laugh at the same time.  (The Office is not an altogether original concept.) When it’s over you’ll realize you never actually saw any men on stage. By our count, this is the fourth play with an all-female cast that Jackie Maxwell has programmed since she’s been in charge — not a bad idea, since just at this point in its history, the female contingent of the Shaw company is remarkably strong. Deborah Hay, Mary Haney, Kelli Fox, and Sharry Flett will be among The Women. Ms. Hay will play Sylvia Fowler, the treacherous friend of Mary Haines, to be played by Jenny Young.

2. Harvey (Mary Chase).  If classic American comedies are what people will pay money to see (as was the case with Born Yesterday in the season just past; see Emsworth’s review of that excellent show), why not put on two? This play won the Pulitzer in 1945, and the 1950 movie starring Jimmy Stewart is among Emsworth’s five favorite films.

Elwood Dowd (James Stewart) admires a portrait of himself and Harvey in the 1950 movie

Harvey is, of course, the sentimental, half-magical story of the ever-pleasant, alcoholic, eccentric Elwood Dowd and his socially inconvenient friend Harvey, an invisible six-and-a-half foot rabbit.  Joseph Ziegler will direct; he’s one of the Shaw’s best. Peter Krantz will play Elwood Dowd and Mary Haney his distracted sister Veta.

3. One Touch of Venus (Kurt Weill, Ogden Nash, S. J. Perelman). The Shaw Festival is evidently ceding the field of expensive big production musical plays to the Stratford Festival. In 2007 and 2008, the Shaw put on two of the finest musicals we’ve ever seen (Mack and Mabel and Wonderful Town), but they evidently weren’t as popular as they needed to be. The Shaw’s 2009 musical, Sunday in the Park with George, was, as we sorrowfully reported, a crashing bore (see this post).

So the Shaw is trying to re-create past glories. Back in 2005, the Shaw pulled Kurt Weill’s edgy musical Happy End out of utter obscurity; it did so well that they brought it back in 2006.  In 2010, it’ll be One Touch of Venus, a not-quite-so-obscure Kurt Weill musical about what happens when a barber from the New York suburbs brings a priceless statue of Venus to life (they fall in love). The songs include “Speak Low,” which we know mostly from Barbra Streisand’s “Back to Broadway” album a few years ago. Robin Evan Willis will play the goddess; Deborah Hay also appears.

James M. Barrie

4. Half an Hour (James M. Barrie) We are extraordinarily partial to both the novels and the plays of J. M. Barrie (see this Emsworth review of a recent Barrie biography) and think he belongs in the top tier of English writers.  This poignant one-act play — we’ve only read it, never seen it — is superb drama, as a mistreated young wife flees to a lover. Expect an emotional roller-coaster and a shocking plot twist. But don’t expect Half an Hour to be anything like Peter Pan — it’s more in the vein of Noël Coward’s Still Life, which the Shaw presented in 2009 (see Emsworth’s delighted review). The talented and extremely attractive Diana Donnelly will play Lady Lillian.

This will be the “Lunchtime” offering at the Shaw this year.  These hour-long $30 shows are a great bargain, though we wonder how Half an Hour will take up the full hour of the show. Might there be another short one-act Barrie play? Coincidentally, Peter Pan is on the playbill at the Stratford Festival for 2010.

5. An Ideal Husband (Oscar Wilde). Once again, the Shaw’s looking backwards; An Ideal Husband was such a hit in 1995 that the Shaw brought the production back for a second year. But we don’t weary of Wilde and applaud the Shaw Festival for keeping his plays in rotation. An Ideal Husband is the story of a woman who worships her husband, a hot-shot British politician, to be played by the silver-haired Patrick Galligan; she’s ill-prepared to learn from a morally challenged rival that her husband has a skeleton in his closet. (Insider trading, of all things, is a theme at the Shaw in 2010.)

6. Serious Money (Caryl Churchill). Candidly?  We’re skeptical of contemporary plays that we don’t know anything about, and ticket prices being what they are, we don’t often take chances. We’ve been burned too often with newer plays that aren’t any better than mediocre TV sitcoms.  Not to say that good plays haven’t been written in the last fifty years — we know all about Edward Albee, August Wilson, Neil Simon, and David Mamet – but we’re not good at sifting the wheat from the chaff.  So if the Shaw Festival is going to weed out the dreck of the post-modern era and bringing the good stuff to Niagara-on-the-Lake, we’re all for it.

We don’t know much about Caryl Churchill except that she’s a leftist with an interest in gender issues. That would ordinarily be a recipe for dreariness and drivel.  But Churchill is also said to be one of the finest living English playwrights, and Shaw Artistic Director Jackie Maxwell still has capital with us, so we’ll give Serious Money a shot. The play was written in 1987 and apparently has to do with shenanigans in the stock market.

This contemporary drama will be at the new, small Studio Theater space where The Entertainer was presented in 2009. (We liked both the space and the John Osborne play; see this Emsworth review). We are grateful to see that tickets for shows in the Studio Theater space are cheaper — only $49 — though we’re not quite sure why. Or perhaps we do — would we pay full price for a pig in a poke?

7. The Doctor’s Dilemma (George Bernard Shaw). What does it say about the status of Bernard Shaw at the Shaw Festival when no Shaw play is scheduled to be performed till mid-June, nearly three months after the season starts?  Ominously, a recent piece in one of the Toronto papers suggested that Shaw’s standing among playwrights of the modern era isn’t what it used to be. Is it possible that the Shaw Festival is beginning to feel weighed down by having to build its seasons around Shaw?

We hope not — the Shaw plays have been better than ever in recent years, including The Devil’s Disciple, which was one of the best things we saw anywhere in 2009 (see this post) and Mrs. Warren’s Profession (ditto in 2008; see this post).  The Doctor’s Dilemma deals with a doctor (Patrick Galligan) who has to choose between two patients who need the same life-saving treatment; he can treat only one.  Now that Obamacare has become law in the United States, of course, the theme has renewed relevance for us patrons from the United States.

8. The Cherry Orchard (Anton Chekhov). Ever since we saw a marvelous production of this play at the BAM Harvey Theater in Brooklyn last winter (see our review), The Cherry Orchard has rated as one of our very favorite plays. The cast will include Shaw all-stars Benedict Campbell and Jim Mezon. Sadly, the exquisite Goldie Semple, who had been scheduled to appear in this play, passed away last winter. We’re looking forward to seeing it close up in the Courthouse Theatre.

A scene from one of the earlier productions of The Age of Arousal (we borrowed the image from Linda Griffiths's website)

9. The Age of Arousal (Linda Griffiths). Two contemporary plays in one season? Things are definitely changing at the Shaw Festival. Written in 2007, this play is practically fresh off the press. Set in 1885, The Age of Arousal is about a London suffragette, Mary Barfoot, who opens a typewriting school to help young women become independent.

Linda Griffiths is an award-winning Canadian playwright and actress, but this is the first this American has heard of her. So many contemporary writers find Victorian mores an inviting target; we hope the play’s not just another version of “isn’t it awful how repressed they were before the sexual revolution?” Or, God forbid, a stage version of a bodice-ripper.

10. John Bull’s Other Island (George Bernard Shaw). We saw this play at the Shaw Festival in 1998 and again here in Rochester at GeVa Theater several years ago, and we just haven’t taken to it. So we figure to give it a miss in 2010, feeling we are not bound to like every Shaw play. It’s the story of a couple of men from London who go to Ireland and get mixed up with a Irish beauty and local politics. Benedict Campbell and Graeme Somerville will play Tom Broadbent and Larry Doyle.

Lessons in quarrelling well from Shakespeare and Oscar Wilde

We were brushing up on Julius Caesar ahead of seeing the play at the Stratford Festival (Stratford, Ontario) this weekend when it dawned upon us that we had already witnessed one of the finest quarrels in all English drama earlier in the summer — and that we were about to witness the other.

And the closer we looked, the more we thought that the magnificent quarrels between Brutus and Cassius, in one play, and Gwendolen Fairfax and Cecily Cardew, in the other play (The Importance of Being Earnest), had a lot in common. Himself pacific, conciliatory, and non-confrontational, Emsworth can only fantasize about quarreling as tactically as Brutus or as stylishly as Gwendolen. But we can take a lesson as well as the next person. Here’s what we’ve learned about the art of quarreling well.

Nurse your grievances and pick your moment

Satisfactory quarrels doesn’t just happen; there’s always a back-story. Cassius doesn’t just “happen” to bump into Brutus on a dark night near Sardis (Julius Caesar, Act IV, Scene 3); he comes looking for Brutus, full of his grievances, loaded for bear, spoiling for a fight. “Most noble brother, you have done me wrong.” (In the aftermath of Caesar’s assassination, the high-minded Brutus has impoliticly executed Cassius’s friend Lucius Pella for taking bribes from the Sardinians.)

And Gwendolen Fairfax doesn’t just “happen” to wander by the Manor House in Woolton where the object of her jealousy, Cecily Cardew, lives with Gwendolen’s new fiancee (The Importance of Being Earnest, Act II). Gwendolen comes with daggers sharpened, fully intending to obliterate her supposed rival: “Cecily Cardew? What a very sweet name! Something tells me that we are going to be great friends. I like you more than I can say.”

Don’t start the quarrel without a plan

As Caesar himself saw, Cassius was a calculating man. (“He thinks too much; such men are dangerous.” Act I, Scene 2.) But Cassius surprisingly fails to bring any plan of attack to Sardis other than to air his complaints.

Michelangelo's Brutus

His adversary, on the other hand, is thinking strategically from the outset. Brutus first buys a little time by having Cassius send his men away (“our armies . . . should perceive nothing but love from us”). Then he nails down home-field advantage by inviting Cassius into his tent.

In The Importance of Being Earnest, Cecily Cardew has no time to plan quarrel tactics, since she is not expecting Gwendolen. But she instantly recognizes Gwendolen as her enemy, makes a telling counter-thrust, and (like Brutus) takes control of the battlefield: “How nice of you to like me so much after we have known each other such a comparatively short time. Pray sit down.”

Drive your adversary mad with personal aspersions

Brutus knows that nothing will put Cassius off his game like a personal insult. Sure enough, telling Cassius that he has a reputation for an “itching palm” infuriates his fellow assassin:

“I, an itching palm?
You know you are Brutus that speaks this,
Or by the gods, this speech were else your last.”

Cassius knows he’s being baited (“Brutus, bait not me, I’ll not endure it”), but it doesn’t matter; he never gets in another solid lick through the rest of the quarrel.  Brutus keeps up the jabs (“Away, slight man!”) and calls Cassius a madman.

At the Stratford Festival's 2009 production, Sara Topham is Gwendolen, and Andrea Runge is Cecily.

The Victorians are better able than Cassius to keep their composure under volleys of calculated insults.  Gwendolen and Cecily (temporarily under the impression that Ernest Worthing has engaged himself to both of them) are well-matched. Cecily alludes to Gwendolen as an “entanglement”; Gwendolen tells Cecily she is presumptuous.  The points are even.

Escalate!

The most entertaining part of any well-conducted quarrel is the moment in which the enraged combatants veer off on bunny-trails, take random potshots at each other, and reduce themselves to “did/did not/did too.” In Julius Caesar, Brutus knows how to hit the pugnacious Cassius where it hurts:

Cassius: When Caesar liv’d, he durst not thus have mov’d me.
Brutus: Peace, peace! you durst not so have tempted him.
Cassius: I durst not?
Brutus: No.
Cassius: What? durst not tempt him?
Brutus: For your life you durst not.

The Romans rise to greater heights of eloquence a minute later:

Cassius: I denied you not.
Brutus: You did.
Cassius: I did not.

Meanwhile, Cecily twits Gwendolen by putting unwanted sugar in her tea and by giving her cake when she has asked for bread and butter. Gwendolen takes off the mask: “From the moment I saw you I distrusted you. I felt you were false and deceitful.”

Play the guilt card for a winning hand

No doubt recognizing that he cannot compete with Brutus in the arena of personal invective, Cassius resorts to infllicting guilt. He whines to Brutus that he “hath riv’d my heart” and that “a friend should bear his friend’s infirmities,” and he complains, “You love me not.” Brutus has only a weak retort: “I do not like your faults.” Cassius trumps: “A friendly eye could never see such faults.”

A minute later, Brutus — so masterly in the early rounds! — throws in the towel. Cassius claims victory amidst the lovefest:

Brutus: When I spoke that, I was ill-tempered too.
Cassius: Do you confess so much? Give me your hand.
Brutus: And my heart too.
Cassius: O Brutus!

By the end of the second act of The Importance of Being Earnest, Cecily and Gwendolen realize that their quarrel is really with their fiancees.  Their first tactic as a combined force is to shower guilt upon Jack and Algernon.  The boys cower under the attack:

Cecily: A gross deception has been practised on both of us.
Gwendolen: My poor wounded Cecily!
Cecily: You will call me sister, will you not?
[They embrace. Jack and Algernon groan and walk up and down.]
Gwendolen: Let us go into the house. They will hardly venture to come after us there.
Cecily: No, men are so cowardly, aren’t they?
[They retire into the house with scornful looks.]

All in all, where will you find two more satisfactory quarrels?

Other posts from Emsworth about shows in the Stratford Festival’s 2009 season:

The musical A Funny Thing Happened on the Way to the Forum (see this post)

Shakespeare’s Julius Caesar (see this post)

Ben Jonson’s Bartholomew Fair (see this post)

The folly of suggesting that Shakespeare should be “translated” for modern audiences (see this post)

Oscar Wilde’s The Importance of Being Earnest (see this post)

What P. G. Wodehouse owes to Oscar Wilde (see this post)

The musical West Side Story (see this post)

What P. G. Wodehouse owes to Oscar Wilde

Wilde

(April 2009) Seeing The Importance of Being Earnest at the Shaw Festival in 2004 persuaded us that P. G. Wodehouse had no greater literary influence than Oscar Wilde. How very like Wodehouse’s idle young men in spats were Algernon Moncrieff and Jack Worthing (as played by David Leyshon and Evan Buliung)! How very like the manner of Jeeves was the deadpan sarcasm of Algernon’s manservant Lane (as played by Robert Benson)! How very much like Bertie Wooster’s dragon aunts was Algernon’s aunt, Lady Bracknell!

Wodehouse

And how much do Wodehouse plots owe to The Importance of Being Earnest?  In how many Wodehouse stories do young men and women make their way into English country houses posing as tutors or gardeners or friends of friends so they can pursue forbidden romances or purloin prize pigs or play detective? Of course Wilde’s play is a story of imposters too. When he is in London, Jack adopts the identity of a fictitious brother named “Ernest” so that he can live the life of a libertine in the city (as Ernest) without tarnishing his respectable reputation back home in the country. And when Algernon wants to meet Jack’s pretty ward Cecily Cardew (who like so many Wodehouse young women cannot marry without her guardian’s permission), he goes to the country house where she is staying, posing as Jack’s much talked-about but never-seen brother “Ernest”.

Wodehouse was only an impressionable 14 years old when The Importance of Being Earnest premiered in 1895, and we think it must have influenced him powerfully.  If you took out of Wodehouse all the foppish young men, imposters, domestic blackmail, dragon aunts, butlers, and young women who need permission from guardians to marry — that is, the characters, the plot, and the comic elements of Wilde’s play — there wouldn’t be much Wodehouse left on our library shelves. And why else would Eustace Mulliner’s man Blenkinsop (in Wodehouse’s short story “Open House” have prepared cucumber sandwiches for Eustace’s visiting Aunt Georgiana, if not for the example of the cucumber sandwiches served by Algernon Moncrieff to Lady Bracknell in the first scene of Wilde’s play?

It’s easy to identify the writers who were dear to Wodehouse’s heart; his novels and stories have thousands of quotations from and allusions to Keats, Tennyson, Arthur Conan Doyle, and especially Shakespeare. Nowhere, however, is Wodehouse’s delight in Oscar Wilde so transparent as in his 1952 novel Pigs Have Wings.

Galahad Threepwood in one of Wodehouse's later, lesser novels

There is, first, Lord Emsworth’s brother Gally. The now middle-aged Galahad Threepwood (a recurring Wodehouse character) has spent his life carousing in nightclubs and chasing barmaids, just as he did in the 1890s when he was a young man. (Galahad’s character is the antithesis of that of the pure knight of the Arthurian legends.) Remarkably, however, Gally’s decades of fast living have had no impact on his health or his perennially youthful appearance — no more than they did, Wodehouse gleefully tells us in Pigs Have Wings, on Dorian Gray.

Ivan Albright's alarming 1943 painting of Dorian Gray is at the Art Institute of Chicago

The chief imposter in Pigs Have Wings is the butler’s niece Maudie, formerly a barmaid, now co-proprietor of a detective agency. Gally engages her to come incognito to Blandings Castle to help foil what Gally fears to be a plot to either steal or nobble Lord Emsworth’s prize-winning fat pig — and he insists that she pose as “Mrs. Bunbury,” an old friend of one of the guests.

Brian Bedford will take the part of Lady Bracknell at the Stratford Festival in 2009

Wodehouse’s choice of “Bunbury” for Maudie is surely an act of homage to Oscar Wilde.  The reference, of course, is to opening scene of The Importance of Being Earnest , when we learn that for some time Algernon has pretended to have a friend in the country named Bunbury whom Algernon must frequently visit because of Bunbury’s alleged ill health. Whenever Algernon wants to escape London because of inconvenient social obligations, he pleads that his friend “Bunbury” needs him and flees town. While Wodehouse shows his affection for other authors by quoting from them, he acknowledges his debt to Oscar Wilde by using the names of Wilde characters in his stories — as in The Inimitable Jeeves, where Wodehouse makes “Lord Windermere” a character in a clichéd penny novel.

We have tickets to see The Importance of Being Earnest again next month in Ontario, this time at the Stratford Festival. Stratford stalwart Brian Bedford will be directing and playing Lady Bracknell (in drag), but the roles of Algernon and Jack will be played by two actors that we’ve seen most often in years past at the Shaw Festival, Mike Shara and Ben Carlson.

June 2009: We liked Bedford’s production of The Importance of Being Earnest. See this post.

October 2009. We weren’t altogether satisfied with the Stratford Festival’s 2009 Macbeth, but it did remind us how Wodehouse borrowed the most famous lines in Shakespeare’s play and turned them on their heads in his comic stories. See this post.