The pandemic has had a devastating effect on theatre companies everywhere; fortunately, they are full of creative and resourceful individuals. As the Theatre Editor for BSECS Criticks, finding performances of eighteenth-century materials has often been challenging, even when there isn’t a global pandemic. What has surprised me over the last year is how companies, moving performances online and untethered by budgets and profits, have embraced the period’s creativity with their own ingenuity. One such company is the R/18 Collective. The following is an interview from Andrew Black with the Collective’s director Misty Anderson and David Taylor.
– Dr Katie Aske, Theatre Editor
The R/18 Collective has been doing energizing work even during the pandemic. The Collective seeks both to cultivate strong, reciprocal relationships between scholars and theater artists and to increase awareness among theatre audiences of the great riches embedded in the dramatic works of the era. They’ve been busy: Director Misty Anderson has worked with a remarkable and innovative group of actors to stage Aphra Behn’s 1687 play The Emperor of the Moon and Richard Brinsley Sheridan’s 1779 The Critic over Zoom to rapt, geographically disparate virtual audiences. In addition, they’ve helped promote Against the Grain Theatre’s exciting collaboration with the Toronto Sympathy of Handel’s Messiah. Messiah/Complex, Misty Anderson writes, “re-imagines the The Messiah through the lens of sovereignty, indigeneity, and queered perspectives on gender, all in a specifically Canadian landscape.” On 23 March 2021, the Collective has organized an online roundtable with members of the company and scholars specializing in theatre, music, and indigeneity in the eighteenth century. You can register for the event here.
Misty Anderson, Professor of English at the University of Tennessee, has written Female Playwrights and Eighteenth-Century Comedy and Imagining Methodism in Eighteenth-Century Britain: Enthusiasm, Belief, and the Borders of the Self. In addition to editing The Oxford Handbook of the Georgian Theatre, 1737-1832, David Taylor, Associate Professor of English Literature at the University of Oxford, is the author of Theatres of Opposition: Empire, Revolution, and Richard Brinsley Sheridan and The Politics of Parody: A Literary History of Caricature, 1760–1830.
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The homepage for the R/18 Collective states that you are “re-activating” Restoration and 18th-Century drama for the 21st Century. Why hasn’t it been active, and what relevance does it have for us now?
Misty: This came about from a series of conversations at conferences over the years from those of us who really share a passion for performance studies. We’ve all written a great deal about these plays and contributed to the archive of print. What we want now is the archive of performance knowledge, so the origin story of this, the “let’s really do it” moment, is sitting outside the Royal Shakespeare Company in Stratford with Danny O’Quinn and Lisa Freeman, having just seen Venice Preserved the night before and about to walk into The Provoked Wife. We were giddy with excitement and we said, what is it going to take to get directors and companies to do more of this work? Even at the RSC, it’s kind of a rare thing, and so thus the project was born.
David: I think that if you speak to anyone who teaches plays of the Restoration and eighteenth century, anyone who writes about those plays, they will tell you how much they would love to be able to watch them. They will look at their colleagues in Shakespeare studies with envy in that respect. Not only is Shakespeare ubiquitous, but there’s great experimentation and diversity within that performance culture. That just doesn’t exist for our period. So there’s a real mismatch between what’s happened in scholarship over the past twenty or thirty years with regard to Restoration and eighteenth-century theatre and what’s happening or not happening on the stages in Britain and North America. Who’s going to change this? There’s no point in us moaning about it; we’ve actively tried to establish dialogue with theater makers that will support them and excite them in ways that means that more of this is being staged.
When this work is staged by and large, it’s the familiar things: She Stoops to Conquer, Way of the World, that kind of thing. We are building on momentum created by recent productions of less often performed plays at the likes of the RSC, the Orange Tree Theatre, and the Donmar Warehouse. We want to see more of these plays performed.
Misty: I’ve always thought it’s a bit ironic that the eighteenth century and David Garrick in particular single-handedly give us the Shakespeare industry only to have the plays of our period completely eclipsed by work in Renaissance theater. This is not to challenge Shakespeare’s place in the Anglophone Theatre archive. It’s just to note that the notion of doing historical work at all for companies who would go back into an archive and find something there presumes that that’s going to be largely through Shakespearean training, and there’s a whole industry built up around that. In fact, these plays, and especially the comedies, require what Carol Mayo Jenkins (actor in both Emperor of the Moon and The Critic) calls “mouth calisthenics” in order to do this work. She described her experience as an actor doing plays like Way of the World as a marathon: you know you have to train for it, but the satisfactions of having run a marathon don’t appeal to everyone. So how do we get the training that actors need? What are going to be their experiences? We’re trying to think through the questions of why these plays haven’t been done. Some of the most exciting conversations we’ve had have been around what happens when we look hard into the moment where empire and revolution and ideas about the individual begin to relandscape, literally, the globe. And that is what’s exciting and scary about these plays. Getting people to think about them in those terms as opposed to white handkerchiefs and big wigs is also at the heart of what we’re doing.
David has posted a bibliography of scholarship covering a host of topics and authors from this period, and Misty, you used to be the editor of Restoration – one of the great journals that deals with the literature of the period. How has scholarship changed or enhanced the way we think about the period stage?
David: If you go back thirty years, it’s not that there’s not people writing about this kind of drama, but there’s not that much work on it. More and more people have turned to researching this drama, and there are so many great plays. There’s a lot of rubbish out there as well, but fascinating rubbish! The study of eighteenth-century theater benefits hugely from the cultural-studies turn in the 1980s. The most exciting work in the past couple of decades has been done in terms of empire, of thinking about race, about sexuality, the history of capitalism. These are the stories that as a field we’ve been telling and nuancing in really fascinating ways. To some extent, we’re saying to our colleagues in eighteenth-century studies, where the novel remains the preeminent form and print the preeminent medium, that your picture is very distorted if you ignore everything that’s happening in theater: the theater is a crucible for changes at the level of the subject and at the level of society.
Misty: To pick up on the point about print, print has always been a paradox for people who work in theater studies. It’s the illusion that the script is “the thing,” when the performance is the thing. Picking the turning point? David’s work, Lisa Freeman, Kristina Straub’s Sexual Suspects, Joseph Roach’s Cities of the Dead. We’re just now at a place where we can use some of that bubbling up of scholarship in live performance and it’s genuinely exciting.
On Misty’s video for “Theater Thursday”, you mention that theater can “call out injustice,” recognizing that the theater – then and now – is a site where “identities were mediated.” How do you see that happening in one of the recent productions?
Misty: Anglophone theater has been grappling with its own race problems and the ways that institutional racism shapes casting. For us, what we are calling identity-conscious casting is a key to thinking about what this historical performance project really means. We’ve been talking about the terms that we use, and the reason that “identity-conscious” gets us somewhere that “race-blind” doesn’t (an idea that misses the boat of its own best intentions) is that it’s really important to acknowledge the raced and gendered forms of identity as they have taken their modern shape, that an actor necessarily brings to the room. Identity-conscious casting gives the forms of identity in the twenty-first century back to an actor as tools to use in a way that is very empowering.
A good example is Francelli Chapman, an actress who dropped in on Emperor of the Moon. When she comes into the room, she’s bringing this hilarious and fantastic and embodied sense of herself. Letting her bring her present self to a role in which sexuality is a really interesting component, something that’s making the farce tick on her own terms, rather than some message about historical work that demands that a performer channel some idea about past identity which would only then reproduce a condition of a kind of whiteness. Lisa Freeman coined the phrase “the unbearable whiteness of Restoration drama.” That’s the last thing we want. I think we have a tool for the moment that empowers actors to approach this material. Because the material is hard. When you bring the identity categories you currently inhabit into the room, what we’re doing is a kind of exegesis of the long histories of these identities as you go back into the archive. That may sound like an argument for presentism or an argument against historical training, and that’s not what I mean. But don’t flatten out the plays by some preexisting idea about style, which I think has always been a struggle for actors and directors who take up this work: how not to be overwhelmed by the idea of style, but instead to discover it in a very authentic way in that encounter with history that you can only have from the present.
David: It’s interesting that in Britain, many of the major drama schools have stopped teaching Restoration drama and last year students of the Royal Academy of Dramatic Art put out an anti-racist action plan which raised concerns about Restoration drama, which they saw as a conservative form in which characters were problematically implicated in the ideology of empire. To those of us who’ve been researching this period, those points are nothing new. By and large, when this drama has been performed, it has been in a very conservative way, always in period costume and often with very white casts. So the students at RADA are right, but the answer to the problem they raise lies in the how these plays are performed. Their conservatism is largely a matter of our own stage conventions, which need to change.
We want to encourage theaters to experiment. Yes, these plays say problematic things with regards to sexuality, race, empire, and gender. So too do Shakespeare plays. I’m not sure there’s a play in the eighteenth century that’s more challenging on the grounds of sexuality and gender than Taming of the Shrew, for instance. We want to enable and empower directors, producers, and actors to take the work seriously, to grapple with it in experimental ways. I’ve always loathed the idea of “Restoration-ness.” When I watch these plays, it often seems like pantomime season as actors flounce around in big wigs and lavish costumes. But there are some very important exceptions to this. What I found exciting about the RSC’s The Provoked Wife was that Philip Breen, the director, and his cast took that play, comedy that it was, very seriously. We as scholars can help practitioners, just as they can help us, to see the grounds for exploration and experimentation and also for thinking hard and seriously about what these plays are saying to us about race, sexuality, gender, and the subject.
Misty: David brokered a conversation with Philip Breen, so when I was over for BSECS we got to sit down with him and have him on our panel and really talk about his wildly intelligent and perceptive production. What he understands is that it’s a chilling comedy, so he could really celebrate the light and the dark of it. That’s the beginning of breaking from some artificial notion of style and really engaging with this work. But we’re our own worst enemies sometimes in wanting to recover the history of these plays. Let’s face it: the clothes are fabulous. There’s a celebration of style within the period that has its own kind of infectious qualities, the larger-than-life figures that come out of this work. But it’s a betrayal of what’s going on in the period and in these plays to flatten back out to that. We think the conversation with practitioners is the next step in doing the research, to be stewards and investigators of this period.
The pandemic offered the threat of, as in 1642, shutting down the theaters. But theater performers have been incredibly resourceful – I’m thinking of John Krasinski getting the cast of Hamilton to sing to his daughter, or Mary Denny playing all the roles of her favorite musicals in her apartment. The R/18 Collective deserves a special kind of celebration for bringing together a distant group of very talented performers to put on performances that take advantage of, rather than are limited by, digital technologies like Zoom. How?
Misty: The conditions of access have changed forever because of the pandemic. Even Broadway is streaming from their archive at this point. But we also want to restore those conditions of presence. I absolutely want live production of these plays. But they’re expensive because they have big casts. If we can work out some things about licensing, Zoom gives you a way around that problem. We were able to curate a series of plays that we thought would work in this medium. How does this medium let you reproduce different kinds of affect and relations to the audience in the absence of being together? Which is why we use the chat very actively to have the risk of knowing that we’re present with each other. Those live conditions are something that Zoom can reproduce.
Can it work as a recording? That’s where we get into the radical access project. What if high school students could see a Zoom production or a video production of a play when they live in rural Idaho and there’s no playhouse within a hundred miles. How can we democratize this art form without sacrificing it? I hope that the theater community can do that. For Emperor of the Moon, it was really actors Charles Pasternak and Charlotte Munson who fell in love with Behn’s farce. As soon as they hit on that we were like: of course! It’s a perfect Zoom play. It’s already about the visual and about illusion and misperception, about playing with and manipulating what people are seeing. But they’re live theater people and don’t want to be in film. So how do we bring these things together? How can we make this moment where there are changing conditions of access drive something much better? I would love to see Zoom readings continue post-pandemic because it allows you to find the best people and it doesn’t matter if they’re in Canada or the UK or California or New York. We just need enough resources to honor the work and the talent of the people who come together to do it.
David: Part of what we’re doing is trying to think about medium and also about what these plays have to say about their own medium and about the changing mediascape of the period in general. There was a moment while we were talking to each other (on Zoom) when we realized that rather than lamenting how everything was shutting down, this had to be an opportunity for us. There was a need for the kind of thing that these Zoom productions have offered.
A decade ago, I worked with the Theater Royal in Bury St. Edmunds, which was built in 1819. They received money to restore the theater to its Georgian glory. They had a program of full productions by Elizabeth Inchbald, Thomas Holcroft, and George Lillo. But they also, just as importantly, had monthly rehearsed readings. It was that more experimental space, where plays could be put on their feet in a rough and ready way, that fed into the decisions that the Theater Royal made about what would go forward to a full production. Rehearsed readings are so important, and in a sense there’s no reason why they can’t be done on Zoom. You can make it far more accessible and you can bring together actors who are geographically disparate. The Globe Theater has their Read, not Dead program, which brings together a group of actors for a day to do a readthrough of an early modern play. We need the same culture for our own period. Just as we want to see the major repertory companies in North America and Britain doing full, lavish, intricate staging, we also need this kind of work going on.
Misty: And Red Bull is doing that right now in the US. We’re in conversation with them, but whatever happens, the reading is the prelude to getting to realize any of these productions. And even beyond the notion of the pitch, it’s about making sure you have actors who have a continued, engaged facility with the language games that these plays do so beautifully.
In regards to the digital production of Messiah/Complex, we see the way that the beauty of Handel’s libretto can be enhanced through a critical framing rather than rapt admiration or fidelity, moving from what Misty calls “imperial confidence of its Christian nationalism” to “gratitude and the discovery of mutual blessing in one another’s presence.” Can you say some more about this vision, and how we might see more of it in what’s to come in events either created by or sponsored by the R/18 Collective?
Misty: I heard about Messiah/Complex from Alison Conway, and it flew around the R/18 Collective as we were all kind of gobsmacked by what they had done and the remarkable feat of allowing us to listen to the Messiah for the first time. It had a sort of revelatory quality of resituating all of its discourse about nation, about peoples, about comfort, and about the environment. Drawing from Isaiah in the way that it does, topography and landscape are everywhere, and they take that to a Canadian indigenous context. Hat’s off to Against the Grain and Toronto Sympathy for this collaboration! It’s extraordinary to hear for just a moment any of the other languages that drop in to the libretto so beautifully. This is the kind of work that’s going to help us re-imagine what’s at stake for eighteenth-century performance culture, and why it’s something that’s still with us. I am very much of the opinion that we are still in the long eighteenth century. This is a production that addresses some of the more toxic elements of Handel: in particular a kind of nativist tone, a triumphalist vision of Christianity and nationalism that are in the text. Messiah/Complex repurposes them so thoughtfully. In the “nothing about us without us” vein, if we’re going to talk about race or nation in the eighteenth century, we need to make sure it’s not just white people in the room.
David: This is exactly the kind of highly intelligent, experimental approach to the repertoire of this period that we want to see more of.
Let’s dream-cast: each of us is given a budget to make a movie of a play from the long eighteenth century. We also get our choice of stars. The studio will promote it for Oscar consideration like they do the Shakespeare movies. You can even have a time machine if you want it to cast Peter Ustinov or Peggy Ashcroft? What play do you put on, who’s in it, and why?
Misty: So many plays, so little time! I went straight to Vanbrugh and The Relapse. I would want to push for the more modern dress circumstance, and you’ll see my populist hand showing by casting movie and TV actors. Regé-Jean Page is having a moment after Bridgerton and I would love to see him as Lovelace. And then maybe put someone like Elizabeth Olsen as Amanda. I think that would just be a kick in the pants. The problem and the glory of that production is Lord Foppington: who do you trust with the fop? To not turn him into a campy travesty? I want Mark Rylance to play everything, so to have him in there would be amazing.
David: I went for a play that I love so much: Elizabeth Inchbald’s Wives as They Were and Maids as They Are. If you’re looking for comedies that are tonally complex, you’re looking largely at Restoration plays, but I think there are some eighteenth-century plays that do rival that. This play is one of them. In the play, you have two entwined narratives one of which is about a husband-and-wife: Lord Priory and Lady Priory. Lord Priory is the autocratic husband who is very proud of the fact that he gets his wife to go to bed at six in the evening and holds her prisoner at home. And then the other plot revolves around Maria Dorrillon who, unbeknownst to her, is being watched by her returned father in disguise. Maria is very much a woman of fashion but also wonderfully complex.
I’d cast Patrick Stewart as Lord Priory because I think he would bring something really interesting to a role that would be very easy to caricature. As Lady Priory, I’d have Naomi Harris. As Maria, Jennifer Lawrence would bring a playfulness and intelligence that the role demands. And as her friend Lady Mary Raffle, who gets into lot of scrapes, I’d have Phoebe Waller-Bridge. Maria’s father is a difficult character who is hard to like, but you want someone who could do something interesting. I’d have Eddie Murphy who could play the disguised father really well. As the seducer Mr. Bronsley, who goes after Lady Priory, I think Joel McHale would be a brilliant rake.
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Andrew Black is Associate Professor of English and Philosophy at Murray State University. He would like to see Thomas Shadwell’s The Virtuoso starring Mark Rylance as Nicholas Gimcrack.