David Garrick’s fame lives on chiefly as an actor-manager, and so it was with some interest that I attended a staged reading of The Clandestine Marriage, a comedy by Garrick and George Colman the Elder, at Dr Johnson’s House. Although first performed in 1766, this is a play that owes a great debt to the plot intricacies and characterizations of a Restoration comedy – a fact which the programme freely acknowledged.
The story centres on two families: the foppish Lord Ogleby and his two nephews, an ancient family who have fallen on hard times; and the merchant Mr Sterling, his sister and two daughters, new money and very socially ambitious. A marriage is planned between Sir John (Lord Ogleby’s heir) and Miss Elizabeth Sterling – but Sir John falls in love with Elizabeth’s younger sister Fanny, who is in turn secretly married to his impoverished cousin, Mr Lovewell. As the play progresses, Lord Ogleby also falls in love with Fanny, and much of the comedy comes from the misunderstandings Fanny meets with as she fends off her admirers, as well as the gaucheness of the Sterling family’s pretensions to gentility.
The venue for the performance was on the top floor of Dr Johnson’s House, and it is very small – really just a long white room that reminded me of an assembly room in a town hall, laid out with fold-up chairs. Although not exactly cosy, it was well-lit and it was easy to feel at home there. This is apparently the room where Johnson wrote his dictionary – how exciting! – although I can’t truthfully say that this added much to the performance. A large number of people who were attending the play appeared to know one another already, as they stood up and greeted one another, and laughed with the staff, all friendly and enthusiastic to a person. I spoke to a lady during the interval who confirmed this for me: there is a regular crowd who attend plays and lectures there. I asked her if The Clandestine Marriage was typical of the sort of performance that they put on. To a certain extent, was the answer – there was usually more improvisation, but there was a similar level of good-natured informality, to which the friendly conversation between audience members certainly contributed.
This informality was certainly a success – the simple, evocative costumes and minimal props were evidence enough that elaborate production designs aren’t always required. I was struck by the difference between this and last year’s spectacular production of The Beggar’s Opera at the Open Air Theatre in Regent’s Park – the plays are quite different, of course, but there was an authenticity in the simple, loosely costumed reading of The Clandestine Marriage that was not present in the other.
Indeed, the fact that all the actors had their scripts did not detract from the performances. Perhaps it recalled the practice (common in the first half of the eighteenth century) of reading aloud from a book to an audience. The actors correspondingly made several attempts at directly engaging with the audience: ‘No one hears us’, said Betty the maid when conspiring with her mistress, eyeing the front row. Moments such as these worked well and were greatly appreciated. The one obvious blunder that was made was not ignored or covered up, but instead acknowledged good-humouredly, in a way that suited the performance. ‘Good-humoured’ is how I would characterize the production generally. There was no sting in the tail here – even when Mr Sterling agreed to allow Sir John to cast one of his daughters aside for the other, or when Aunt Heidelberg publicly disavowed Fanny’s marriage to Lovewell.
For all that the play is so obviously bound up with competing masculinities – old wealth versus young wealth versus young poverty – no efforts were made to draw these out, and it was mostly left to the script to discuss the presentation of an ‘ideal’ gentleman (and husband) – which came down quite unambiguously on the side of Lovewell. Yet looking at The Clandestine Marriage in the context of the earlier comedies it models itself after, Lovewell’s role is typically filled by former rakes (such as Loveless in The Relapse) or determined young men (such as Fainwell in A Bold Stroke for a Wife); Lovewell, by contrast, is striking in his passivity as he watches his cousin and his uncle ineffectively attempt to woo his wife without intervention. This is a shortcoming of the script itself which perhaps a more formal staging of the play may have addressed – but then again, it might also have made the production less affable.
The acting was very good, Patrick Knox’s Lord Ogleby and Nadia Nadif as the spoiled Elizabeth especially so. I particularly enjoyed the latter’s first scene, in which she boasted of the glamorous lifestyle she intended to enjoy when married to Sir John. It occurred to me then that if any eighteenth-century character could be described as a female fop, it is Elizabeth Sterling.
Owing to the limited space available, the performance area did rather dominate the play rather than vice versa, and in many of the scenes which called for more than three characters, the actors were reduced to standing in a row as they read out their lines. To give them their credit, however, they made good use of the space when it was available, and the scenes which called for fewer characters – such as Lord Ogleby’s attempt at dancing and Sir John’s failed wooing of Fanny – came off successfully, with much laughter and enjoyment from the audience.
If only the ending hadn’t been so abrupt! Again, we might blame Garrick and Colman for this: the scene of resolution is far more sentimental than the typical Restoration comedy. I was somewhat bemused by Ogleby’s uncharacteristically gracious about-face when he learned of the marriage between Fanny and Lovewell, and it seemed to me a difficult transition to make smoothly. The suddenness of the ending might have been softened had Garrick’s epilogue been retained, in which a new cast of characters meta-textually denigrate play-going, Shakespeare and The Clandestine Marriage itself. Unfortunately, this epilogue translates to the modern ear rather less well than what has come before, so perhaps its elimination is no great surprise.
In spite of its shortcomings, to cast aside The Clandestine Marriage as a second-rate imitation is to do it an injustice. There is much in this play to which a modern audience may respond, from leering older men to the precariousness of the stock market. If the director of this production felt any temptation to fashion a link between the Sterling family with another newly monied family whose daughter made a very advantageous marriage last April, he resisted – but the possibility is there. It was an enjoyable evening, and I was left hoping that this wouldn’t be the last time that The Clandestine Marriage would be staged in the coming years.
‘The Clandestine Marriage’ by David Garrick and George Colman played at Dr Johnson’s House on 16th February, 2012. A Clio Company production.