I’m ready to call it. Charles Marlow has to be the least likeable romantic hero in all eighteenth-century stage comedy. He has some fierce competition, to be sure – Congreve’s Mirabell (The Way of the World) is a worthy runner-up – but in his snobbishness, his predatory sexual habits and his perverse affectation of decency, Charles really is the worst prize that a heroine could hope to win. His beloved Kate Hardcastle stoops to conquer a despicable suitor, one who will almost certainly have identified a new mistress within five minutes of the play’s end and will probably have the audacity to blame his wandering eye on Kate’s own intimidating respectability.
In a production of Oliver Goldsmith’s She Stoops to Conquer (1773), Charles’s sleaziness can generally be turned to the comedy’s advantage. His inclination to seduce women of a lower social class (and to freeze in front of women whom he considers his equal) can be presented either as a mark of genuine insecurity or as an amusing and more or less innocent foible, equivalent to Lydia Languish’s amorous whimsies in Sheridan’s The Rivals (1775). Both interpretations become harder to sustain in The Kissing Dance, Howard Goodall and Charles Hart’s 1998 musical reworking of Goldsmith’s play. Where the fantastical qualities of musical theatre assist in the suspension of disbelief for certain aspects of Goldsmith’s plot, they only accentuate the sheer unpleasantness of Charles’s character, and this leads to a curiously mixed impression of the musical itself.
In the programme for All Star Productions’ recent revival of The Kissing Dance, the director, Brendan Matthew, writes of the appealing “romanticism” of the work. While I don’t think the word is quite so applicable to Goldsmith’s play, it is certainly relevant here. She Stoops to Conquer relishes confusion and misunderstanding for their own sake, in keeping with its subtitle, “The Mistakes of a Night”. By contrast, Goodall and Hart subordinate confusion to the glory of love and the mysteries of a starlit evening. The atmosphere actually has less in common with eighteenth-century drama and more with stage comedy’s other great “night”: the otherworldly diversions of Shakespeare’s A Midsummer Night’s Dream. Unfortunately, this shift in tone means that Kate and Charles must become a supporting act in their own story, as their friends George Hastings and Constance Neville make more suitable mouthpieces for tender-hearted declarations of affection. Charles’s behaviour, enjoyably embarrassing in Goldsmith’s play, becomes outright repellent in this context. Mistaking his future father-in-law for an innkeeper, he subjects him to Bullingdon-esque abuse. Throughout his liaisons with a disguised Kate, his hypocrisy is blatant: he suggests to the apparent maidservant that he intends to marry her, but he makes clear to Hastings and others that the flirtation is just a bit of fun. Such conduct is increasingly difficult to square with the musical’s insistence on love conquering all and on inner goodness rising to the surface.
Indeed, Charles’s character isn’t the only example of conflicting impulses in The Kissing Dance. Almost as an attempt to counter the overbearing sentimentality that has crept into the narrative, the writers also introduce a disturbingly sadistic streak into the work. This is best exemplified by the number, “Beating the Knave”, which sees various characters taking turns to thrash the roguish Tony Lumpkin, Kate’s stepbrother. This wouldn’t be so out-of-place in Goldsmith’s play. Tony is after all the mischief-maker who instigates all the misunderstandings of the comedy and whose love of booze and debauchery earns him nothing but contempt from most of his fellow characters. Here however, the beating of Tony seems disproportionate to his crimes, perhaps a case of the musical’s “romanticism” policing its dissenting voices a little too violently. It is telling that Tony is not allowed to remain the proud, awkward bachelor that we see at the conclusion of Goldsmith’s play. Hart picks up on a couple of stray references from the original text to fashion for Tony a working-class love interest, Bet Bouncer. The musical does its best to convince us that these two will live as happily ever after as any of its other pairings. It’s a shame that this happy ending comes at the expense of Tony’s rebelliousness – and also that it necessitates such total disregard for the class divisions underpinning Goldsmith’s plot.
Nonetheless, even if it doesn’t do full justice to the atmosphere or energy of She Stoops to Conquer, The Kissing Dance is an entertaining work in its own right. The All Star production, staged at Ye Olde Rose and Crown theatre pub in Walthamstow, made good use of an impressively large and talented cast, many of whom had only recently graduated from theatre school. Dances, expertly choreographed by Charlotte Tooth, were imaginative and involving, and the standard of singing was high, even in fairly unforgiving acoustics. The musical is at its strongest when the lyrics intertwine naturally with the dominant themes and imagery of the plot. Such is the case in the song “Nonesuch”, a lively show-stopper performed wonderfully by Jacob Jackson’s Tony. Less felicitous are the lyrical choices in the duet “Moonraking”, though Emily Peach (as Constance Neville) and Robert Metson (as Hastings) did admirably with it, adding personality to an otherwise generic number.
The action in this production was moved forward to the year 1918, a decision which should maybe have lent more poignancy to proceedings than it did. It would require some bolder interventions to present Charles as a returning soldier or Kate as a campaigner for women’s suffrage. (I quite like the idea of both reinterpretations, but I suspect that they would have muddled the tone of the musical even further if pursued beyond the vaguely Downton-inspired aesthetic of the set and costumes.) No, the great achievement of this production was not in reimagining the plot or the characters, but in allowing the contradictions of Goodall and Hart’s work to expose the ironies that are already there in Goldsmith’s. The overall effect is far from a comfortable one, and perhaps not entirely what the production was aiming for, but I’m unlikely to look at Charles Marlow and his quirks in the same forgiving fashion ever again.
The Kissing Dance was at Ye Olde Rose and Crown Theatre Pub, Walthamstow, from 10th February to 28th February 2016.