Given that it so deftly satirizes the role of the critic, one might be reticent to review Frances Burney’s biting comedy, The Witlings. Penned in 1779 but never performed in her lifetime, the play chronicles ill judgments and misreadings made by pretending wits and the follies that result from such pretensions and affectations. Theatre Erindale’s production of The Witlings marks the Canadian premiere of Burney’s play which, due to the efforts of her father, Dr. Charles Burney, and their close family friend, Samuel Crisp, (and to the dismay of Richard Sheridan, who had expressed interest in putting it on at Drury Lane) remained hidden among Burney’s personal papers until the mid-twentieth century.
Luckily for this reviewer, the production put on this past week by Theatre Erindale doesn’t offer much to criticize: director Patrick Young and his cast of effervescent young actors breathe life into Burney’s long-lost text. Produced by Professor of Drama and Performance Studies Bruce Barton, The Witlings has a cast and crew consisting almost entirely of students in the program at The University of Toronto, Mississauga. As the production company of the Theatre and Drama Studies program, and in conjunction with students of the nearby Sheridan College Theatre Arts Technical program, Theatre Erindale aims to produce both contemporary and historical plays each season, and casts upper year students in the plays while junior students learn some of the technical aspects of theatre by taking on crew and front-of-house positions.
The Witlings comes as the fifth play of six in Theatre Erindale’s current season, titled “Uppity Women”, which highlights plays by and about strong, subversive women. Burney’s play fits the theme admirably as it not only presents particularly ‘uppity’ female characters, but also engages with the realities of economic dependency and oppression for women in the eighteenth century.
Located on the pastoral UTM campus, The Erindale ‘Studio’ Theatre reflects its name and with less than 10 rows of seating creates an intimate space in which the actors can make eye contact with the back row. They frequently do this throughout the play, and one imagines that in less ‘mannered’ pieces the space is ideal for making the audience a part of the show.
The scene opens in a milliner’s shop, which is a rather unusual setting for the period, yet one that allows for a perfect way to satirize the pretensions certain characters have in regards to literature, by seeing it as aligned with dress and as a matter of ‘taste.’ This first act sees the procession of all the major characters in and out of the doors of the shop as the story’s lover, Beaufort, accompanied by his friend, the sardonic Mr. Censor, observes the women that work in and frequent the shop, including the loquacious and intrusive landlady Mrs. Voluble and the vapid Mrs. Sapient, who has a penchant for proclaiming truisms and common opinions with an air of utter solemnity. Beaufort soon receives information from his half-brother, Jack (who, in an effort to avoid any comparison to his painfully contemplative father, Mr. Codger, aims to always be in ten places at once) that he has been wasting his time in the shop waiting to meet his fiancée, and that his betrothed Miss Cecilia Stanley is detained at the home of his aunt and benefactor, the Lady Smatter. Later at the house, Beaufort’s brother scampers in again to casually deliver news that Cecilia’s entire fortune has been lost at the hands of her bankrupt bookkeeper. This intelligence prompts Lady Smatter to force apart the young lovers, lest her nephew tarnish her good name and marry a pauper. As Cecilia secretly quits Lady Smatter’s, the Esprit party assembles, at which the poet dandy Mr. Dabler makes an entrance, Mrs. Sapient reappears and fauns over his lines, Lady Smatter misreads and criticizes Pope’s Epistle to a Lady, and Mr. Codger, Jack’s bumbling father, is ignored by the rest of the company. While the romantic plot between Beaufort and Cecilia structures the play, the true satire and greatest comic moments lie within these scenes of the Esprit Party led by the patron and chief ‘witling’ Lady Smatter. While the party means to read and criticize works of literature, they seem incapable of proper discussion for want of actually listening to one another.
As a whole, The Witlings is structured around these selfish individual characters and their misinterpretations (sometimes intentional, sometimes not) of the needs and desires of others. For the actors, this presents a challenge in balancing personal character development with ensemble work. Jovan Kocic and Mark Snetzko, in the roles of Jack and his father Mr. Codger exemplify this phenomenon perfectly: the actors themselves must understand one another flawlessly in order to appear as if they can’t properly communicate. Comic timing plays out particularly well between these two, as Jack scurries in and out of the scene and his father grows quietly indignant at not being heard. The play further points out the difficulties of depending on others (and the precarious way in which women are nearly always dependent on men – bankers, husbands, or otherwise – for financial security) and yet rails against those who cannot listen. The satirist Censor seems to strike the finest balance throughout the play, being enough of a misanthrope to remain unattached and independent, and yet an apt enough judge to listen and attack the shortcomings of others. We wonder if his views, coolly espoused by a smart looking Christian Tribuzio, most closely echo Burney’s own sentiments. Censor’s acerbic manner saves him from being disappointed by others, and yet his charming humour and witty quips save him from being reviled by those he satirizes.
As Burney herself noted, the text of The Witlings as she left it is of an “enormous length.” To prevent a running time of four hours, and for the sake of his young actors and their tentative familiarity with eighteenth-century prose style, Director Patrick Young made some cuts to The Witlings. While this notion appeared worrisome to me at first, he keeps the spirit, the story, and certainly the wit of Burney’s original text splendidly. Young notes that his actors were a key part of the editing process. He had his students cold read several drafts with him, taking into account both their opinions on the script and the flow of the reading itself. This involved approach helped Young in revising his script, but also demonstrated to him how relevant Burney’s satire still is, even to people not familiar with her work or that of her period.
Smart as much of Burney’s play is (and as Peter Sabor and Geoffrey Sill note in their introduction to their Broadview edition of The Witlings, published together with The Woman Hater), the romantic plot between Beaufort and Cecilia can at times be slightly strained and heavy-handed. Young and his troupe seem aware of this at moments as well, such as in one particularly mournful soliloquy of Cecilia’s, where she is too distracted by “time … winged with the gay plumage of hope” to hear any of the company speaking directly to her. Mrs. Voluble and her working-class companions cannot help but giggle at Cecilia’s over-drawn distress, and the audience laughs with them at the “fine lady” talking to herself.
Burney’s oft-chosen mode of satirizing affectation is best demonstrated in the details of Young’s production: a foppish Mr. Dabler (played by the droll Tomas Ketchum) holds out a crooked pinky bearing an enormous garnet ring as he composes lines of foolish poetry, as if he were holding a delicate tea cup rather than brandishing a paltry scrap of paper. While moments like this pay due attention to the clever costume design by Barbara Rowe, they also highlight scenes one might enjoy but not necessarily linger over in reading the text.
Mrs. Sapient, played by a wild-eyed and expressive Hannah Ehman, is another such example of this attention to detail. Her lip quivers most excellently when delivering such fine maxims, as “nothing is more disagreeable than to be disappointed.” And as the redundant lady frequently makes such statements, she teaches her audience to anticipate them: she dramatically pauses, turns to face the audience, sucks in her heavily rouged cheeks, bats her eyelashes, and the laughter echoes through the playhouse before she has even begun the line.
The course of the play cannot close without a rowdy ballad lampooning the ills of the most powerful and destructive witling, to which Young has charmingly set a tune recognizable from The Beggar’s Opera. As the entire cast gather in the drawing room of Mrs. Voluble, they join in Jack’s dancing and merry singing at the expense of the cruel Lady Smatter, belting out “sans meaning she talked, and sans knowledge she read” while the Lady, slightly confused but certainly mortified, is finally rendered speechless. It is at this raucous moment, perhaps, that Lady Smatter’s downfall reminds us most of Pope’s line, to which Burney’s title has oft been attributed: “A beau and a witling perish’d in the throng, one died in metaphor, and one in song.”
As the run of The Witlings draws to a close, audiences have Aphra Behn’s restoration romp The Rover to look forward to next in the “Uppity Women” program, and, if The Witlings proves any sort of preview, a fervent, carnivalesque time should follow.
Frances Burney’s The Witlings ran from the 13th February to 2nd March 2014 at the Theatre Erindale, Toronto.