January 9, 2003: Goldsmith, She Stoops to Conquer and January 10, 2003: De Angel
January 9, 2003: Goldsmith, She Stoops to Conquer and January 10, 2003: De Angelis, A Laughing Matter
Both National Theatre Lyttelton, both directed by Max Stafford-Clarke and sharing the same troupe of National Theatre actors
Stafford-Clarke likes to pair two plays that have some kind of complementary relationship, as he did in the Out of Joint production of The Recruiting Officer and Their Country’s Good. The new De Angelis play is about Goldsmith’s futile effort to persuade Garrick to perform She Stoops; or, at least, that is the scaffolding on which the play is hung. Stafford-Clarke (hence S-C) is much more at home with the De Angelis play than with the Goldsmith. In the case of the De Angelis work he is directing personages who can pass for persons captured in their own natural life circumstances, whereas with the Goldsmith he has to contend with actual, high-profile dramatic characters which have a long history on the stage — a history of which he is pretty abysmally ignorant.
That ignorance comes out in his efforts to mount a viable production of She Stoops and, most particularly, in his approach to the character of Tony Lumpkin. This character, which made the career of John Quick, the creator of the role in the first, Covent Garden production in 1773 and enhanced the careers of successive generations of actors, is the life and soul of the play. He has to be played for the rollicking, fun-loving, restrictions-hating seeming ne’er-do-well that he is, even as Goldsmith has arranged for him to bring the play, notwithstanding his own naïve mistakes, to a happy conclusion. He has, in Owen Sharpe, an actor with the potential talent to be this life-saver from the start; but S-C makes him into a surly malcontent up to no good, a malicious, vindictive, bad-tempered, snippy oaf that nobody can like, and it is only Goldsmith’s brilliant planning and his endowment of the character with an unquenchable joie de vivre that brings Sharpe through as the savior of the night, despite S-C’s attempt to impose some sort of self-reflective complexity on a character who is blissfully free of any such modern ruminations. The pace of the play picks up, as it must, toward the end, but the first half lacks verve. S-C misses some nice opportunities in the exchanges between Tony and Constance Neville; and Monica Dolan has to work harder than she ought to have had to represent the viable distinction between the Hardcastle’s properly but not stiffly raised young daughter and the barmaid that the obtuse young Charles Marlow stupidly takes her for. That is, there is a certain ungainliness in Miss Hardcastle that is not in the character and that S-C should have seen and purged from the profile of the role.
Still, there were many good moments in this production, despite Ian Redford’s irritating broadcasting of his lines at high decibels and the intermittent inaudibility of the two young women (at least, they were thus from my perch in the second row of the Lyttelton dress ci