Watching the first production of Hannah Cowley’s The Belle’s Stratagem in well over one hundred years, I can’t help but wonder why it isn’t at least as well known as She Stoops to Conquer, which Cowley’s play wittily invokes and inverts. Jessica Swale’s lively production for the Southwark Playhouse puts to rest the hoary chestnut that eighteenth-century drama doesn’t work in the twenty-first century, that it is no longer ‘relevant.’ Indeed, Swale’s judicious editing and staging highlight the points of overlap between the two periods. This was live theatre; The Belle’s Stratagem is no museum piece and worked wonderfully well in this production which spoke to and about its audience as well as in its own, original language
Going in, I was worried about the use of contemporary song and feared that this production might be post-modernly cutesy, full of arch winks designed to maintain an ironic distance from the original material. The publicity poster certainly helped to fill me with this dread. But I was pleasantly surprised. Far from detracting or distracting, the use of modern pop songs worked exceedingly well, not only fitting Cowley’s play, but also reminding one that bad lyrics (‘Here Come the Girls’, the Spice Girls’ ‘Wannabe’) can make for apt and enjoyable commentary on serious subjects. Using the bevy of husband-hunting country cousins as a chorus was a wonderful way to bridge the gap between the play’s setting and the present day and to draw the audience completely into Cowley’s world.
At times I felt the direction was a touch too reminiscent of the BBC’s recent Casanova, particularly the masked ball scene, but as Cowley’s play also pays homage to a number of hits, not just She Stoops but also The Beaux’ Stratagem, The Country Girl and Amphitryon, this was in keeping with the original as well as successful in its own right. The staging and costume were a triumph: clear, simple use of colour and simple set changes helped audiences keep track of the large cast and their rapid movements between the quasi-private and quasi-public places of fashionable life.
The production’s intertwining courtship and marriage plots, like many eighteenth-century comedies, revolve around a maid and a wife, but, unusually for the genre, it is only the men who need to be reformed to achieve the happy ending. The maid, Letitia (played note-perfectly by Gina Beck), is piqued to discover that the man is contracted to marry, and loves passionately, looks at her with indifference. Her stratagem – to exaggerate gross country manners her in order to inflame him into love for the spirited fine lady she really is – teaches her finance Doricourt (Michael Lindall) to reject his prejudices and know his own heart and happiness. The wife, Lady Frances Touchwood (Hannah Spearitt), is kept a virtual prisoner by her uxorious husband. Sir George Touchwood (Joseph MacNab) is taught that the quickest way to sour love is to guard it too closely, and that a wife one can trust is far more valuable than one that must be kept locked away. Audiences learn that too much love can gall as much as too little, and rational, rather than jealous or sentimental, love wins the day. The young women’s insistence that they be taken seriously, loved for themselves and trusted is as welcome (and relevant) today as it was in 1780.
Perhaps inevitably in a production that focuses our attention on women, the male characters were not as complexly characterized. While the gradations of male social types represented by Courtall, Doricourt, Touchwood, Saville, Flutter and Villers would be immediately clear – and important – to Georgian audiences, the available masculinities of the present day are less nuanced. Jeremy Joyce’s Saville was particularly bland, and while Courtall (Marc Bayliss) flounced and flirted wonderfully well, I would have liked more menace in his libertinism.
The only false note in an otherwise perfectly harmonized production was the decision to reduce Mrs Racket and her sidekick Miss Ogle (Maggie Steed and Jackie Clune) to caricatures of the lustful older woman. That the play’s motley collection of young men, who wonder what the devil a woman lives for after thirty, to quote Burney’s Lord Merton, might see the widow’s and spinster’s desires for physical and romantic love farcical is to be expected – I am rather less sure that Hannah Cowley wanted her audiences to share that perspective. A production that celebrates female sexuality and its heroines’ search for reciprocity in relationships owed its more mature characters the same sensitivity and seriousness that it granted its ingénues: we should have been allowed to laugh with them, rather than invited to laugh at them.
‘The Belle’s Stratagem’ by Hannah Cowley played at the Southwark Playhouse, 6th September to1st October, 2011. A Peter Huntley and Red Handed Theatre Company production; directed by Jessica Swale.