The exploits of Mary Baker alias Mary Wilcox alias Princess Caraboo have prompted musings on theatricality ever since she first caught the attention of journalists and the reading public in the summer of 1817. Just a couple of months after her exposure as a fraud, The Weekly Entertainer yearned for a full re-enactment of the scam, while acknowledging that the young woman’s own performance was unlikely to be improved upon by additional artistry or artifice: “Oh! that we had the pen of a Foote or a Garrick to pourtray [sic] the inimitable acting and the consummate deception of this day’s adventure.” (The Weekly Entertainer, September 15th 1817). That fascination with the theatrical potential of an already theatrical imposture led to a Hollywood film in the 1990s (Baker played by Phoebe Cates) and now to a stage musical, which was developed in collaboration with Bristol Old Vic and, after a few one-off performances, had its full premiere at London’s Finborough Theatre in March and April this year.
Baker’s story touches upon key points of contention within British culture of the long eighteenth century; preoccupations which arguably still shape our national discourse to an unhealthy extent. She was a symbol of class rebellion, an itinerant servant girl who managed to infiltrate (relatively) high society. Her primary dupes were magistrate Samuel Worrall and his wife Elizabeth, who took her into their home at Knole Park near Bristol and introduced her into their social circles. But while the truth of Baker’s background offered a challenge to Britain’s class hierarchies, the substance of the hoax was just as significant for the way it capitalised on attitudes towards the foreign or exotic. Baker posed as a princess from a distant land, improbably stranded in Gloucestershire with no command of English. The genius of the hoax is that Baker left her hosts and other observers to fill in most of her origin story for themselves; yes, she appears to have helped them on their way, but having adopted an invented language, she was free to gesture to a mysterious past and an intriguing personal belief system without ever being vulnerable to self-contradiction. Her Caucasian appearance was no obstacle to speculation, with one commentator reflecting that her diet seemed “Hindoostanic”, and Mrs Worrall apparently reaching the (impressively specific) conclusion that she was half-Chinese, half-Malaysian (all such conjectures were included in The Examiner, 8th June 1817, and reprinted both before and after Baker’s exposure).
What might come as a surprise to those familiar with other hoaxes from the period is the leniency, even admiration, that greeted Baker when her fraud was revealed. Where Mary Toft’s rabbit births of ninety years before had resulted in legal action and widespread condemnation, it appears that appreciation for Baker’s theatrical skill outweighed the humiliation of having being tricked by her. According to several newspaper accounts, she remained on good terms with the Worralls, and by the end of the summer she was on her way to America, where she would attempt to exploit her new-found notoriety, performing the role of Caraboo to audiences already in the know. As a representative of new forms of celebrity, then, and of the Romantic period’s problematic relationship with ideas of authenticity, Baker is fitting subject matter for a work of musical theatre. This is after all a theatrical form traditionally concerned with the suspension of disbelief and with the overt performance of inner feeling.
The Princess Caraboo musical is strongest when it’s at its most playful, exploring the value of performance not just for Baker herself but for British society as a whole. It resembles Kander and Ebb’s wonderful The Scottsboro Boys (2010) in the metatheatrical conceit that underpins the historical narrative. In that musical, the action took the form of a minstrel show, its racist tropes progressively subverted by the humanity of the plot and the characters. Here, the self-reflexivity of the play works to less polemical ends, but is impactful nonetheless. We are watching not a performance but a performance of a performance, the play introduced to us by Worrall himself as a re-enactment, staged by his servants, of the curious episode that unfolded under his roof. This is a good way of side-stepping questions of historical accuracy. It also builds upon the sense of theatrical diversion and amused indulgence that was already conspicuous in contemporary responses to Baker’s deception. Such indulgence is central to the play’s most successful musical numbers: for instance, Act One’s ‘Yes’, in which the ensemble enthusiastically set aside the potential for doubt and revel in the excitement of Caraboo’s spectacle.
Immediately following this song, however, the musical’s writers (Phil Wilmott and Mark Collins) include a rather less effective number. ‘I Am My Own Person’ certainly has a catchy melody and was sung sweetly by Nikita Johal (playing Baker / Caraboo) in the Finborough production. The problem is the song’s sincerity, its eagerness to turn the play’s story into one of female empowerment and authentic feeling. “I have my own opinions and my thoughts belong to me,” our heroine sings, sounding more like a self-assured Disney princess than the obscure, dubiously articulate Princess Caraboo of history. The song provides the climax to Act One and is reprised at the very end of the play as a duet featuring Baker and her love interest, Eddie (played by Christian James). Though this romantic plot is heavily fictionalised – taking only slight inspiration from a portrait of Caraboo by painter Edward Bird – it is hard to object to the embellishment of a story already so rooted in fabrication and its pleasures. What I do take issue with are the intertwined implications of the song’s open-heartedness: that it is possible for us to access what Baker felt or thought at all; that her ownership of her celebrity can be conflated with emotional certitude and self-knowledge; and, crucially, that she intended her deception as a form of self-assertion or even as a political statement. There is a danger here that the ironic insights of the rest of the play get dismissed in favour of simple solutions. And it doesn’t do justice to the economic and educational entrapment of the historical Mary Baker to depict her as a knowing pioneer, effortlessly shaping the world around her.
Similar issues of over-simplification emerge in the musical’s treatment of class hierarchies, though they are perhaps more forgivable here. Wilmott and Collins seemingly felt the need to accentuate class difference in the play so as to make Baker’s story all the more sensational. Samuel Worrall becomes Sir Charles Worrall of Briarwood Hall. Added to the mix is the fictional (but confusingly named) Lord Marlborough, an aristocratic friend of the Worralls who takes a fancy to Princess Caraboo and epitomises the arrogance of the upper classes in his attempts to procure her company. Again, it is fair enough for the playwrights to add tension and conflict to the story, but I can’t help feeling that the caricature of the bullying peer is a little lazy. There are also moments of awkward anachronism and inaccuracy that result from it. At one point, Marlborough is seen introducing Caraboo to “the prime minister”, William Pitt the Younger – a man who had died some eleven years prior to the Caraboo scandal. To make matters worse, Pitt tries to ingratiate himself with Marlborough by promising him “a seat in Parliament”, something that would surely already be his by right of hereditary title. These are quibbles, of course, and needn’t materially affect one’s enjoyment of the play, but they do suggest the unnecessary confusion that can come about when social divisions are exaggerated for comedic or dramatic effect.
On the whole, Princess Caraboo is an entertaining and musically engaging work that is held back at just a few points by an ambivalent attitude towards its historical subject matter. It certainly deserves to be performed again, hopefully in a slightly larger venue and with a more substantial budget than that available for the Finborough production. Maybe such a revival would also provide an opportunity for the writers to rethink the play’s philosophical core: its relationship to those ideas of authenticity that it subverts at one moment and acclaims at the next.
Princess Caraboo was at the Finborough Theatre, London from 30th March to 22nd April 2016.