She Stoops to Conquer - Oliver Goldsmith

Abbey Theatre
July 23 - September 6

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    Irish-born prose, poetry, and drama writer Oliver Goldsmith was far from contemptuous of higher art, but he made a conscious decision to oppose the conventions of eighteenth century comedy in She Stoops to Conquer. First staged in London in 1773, one hundred years after the death of Moliere, it embraced a boisterous sense of humor at a time when a more ‘sentimental’ approach was in vogue. Unimpressed by mild-mannered plays in which characters were portrayed in terms of their good qualities and frustrated by circumstances which tested their virtue, Goldsmith espoused instead what he termed ‘laughing’ comedy in which the characters’ own flaws and vices were the cause of narrative complication.
    She Stoops to Conquer was also an attack upon conventions in characterization. Either foolish bumpkins or naive innocents who accidentally show more sophisticated characters the errors of their ways, stage representations of rural folk at the time played to the prejudices of urban theatregoers. Goldsmith, whose poem The Deserted Village (1770) had been hailed as a tribute to the vanishing glories of England’s rural culture and who had been at least partly raised in Ireland, gave audiences something to think about in his more layered analysis of the rural character. He sees country folk as being capable of weaving subtle plans of their own and also of equally falling victim to traps of their own making. Pitted against well-bred urban gentlefolk who are basically much the same, the tapestry of comic characterization is richly woven.
    The story revolves around a well-to-do rural household where a Mr. Hardcastle (Des Cave) and his wife (Anita Reeves) await the arrival from London of a suitor for their daughter Kate (Justine Mitchell). The suitor, Marlow (Patrick Moy) has a peculiar social affliction. In the company of ladies of quality, he becomes nervous and noncommittal. He prefers the pleasures of females of a different social order, with whom he is much freer with his opinions and affections. He is travelling in the company of George Hastings (Keith Dunphy), a gentleman with designs on Mrs. Hardcastle’s orphaned niece, Constance (Emily Nagle), who holds a small fortune in jewels which she is eager to procure before eloping.     Mrs. Hardcastle has other plans however--to marry Constance to her wayward son Tony Lumpkin (Aaron Monaghan), Kate’s half-brother.
    The plot is set in motion when Marlow and Hastings meet Lumpkin in a roadside tavern and he directs them to the Hardcastle home under the misapprehension that it is an Inn with an eccentric landlord who believes himself a gentleman. The Londoners arrive and duly take extreme advantage of Hardcastle’s hospitality while ignoring his attempts at gentility, to a point where the dumbfounded Hardcastle becomes increasingly angered by the young man’s lack of decorum. Kate meanwhile, having initially met Marlow under formal circumstances and found him wanting, becomes intrigued by his other side when she poses as a barmaid and experiences his more vulgar passions first hand.
    In itself She Stoops to Conquer is a well organized piece of comic writing, employing familiar conventions of mistaken identity and inappropriate behavior to expose hypocrisy and satirize the social mores of its day. Simply and clearly constructed, featuring likable and entertaining characters, there is certainly nothing which evidently requires contextual deconstruction before it can perform its comedic and polemical functions. This Abbey production eschews the ‘updating’ of recent productions like Tartuffe and The Misanthrope. It is performed in full period garb and even features the unfortunate Phelim Drew as a dancing bear who makes bafflingly irrelevant appearances from time to time as a lurking symbol of rustic otherness.
    Director Patrick Mason’s production takes a wide view of the action. He shifts focus away from the subversive aspects onto a more universal comic canvas. Narrative and thematic weight is evenly distributed among the game cast, and though there are few scenes with more than three characters on stage at once, the overall production gives a pleasing sense of an ensemble performance. Good humor abounds, and though the shower of confetti and sing-song which marks the finale seems more like the kind of thing we would expect from a Christmas play, it is hard not to smile.
    There is a great deal of energy on stage, with many entrances and exits and even an on-stage band who open the show in parade carrying a banner with the play’s title emblazoned across it. Yet relatively little use is made of Paul McCauley’s set during the play itself. Other than a useful chair featured near the front of the stage and one desk which doubles as a tavern table at one point, there might as well be no furniture at all, and the decor, though easy on the eye, seems to confine the actors to a relatively narrow circle of movement near the center of the stage. The production never seems static though, and there is always enough going on with the plot to hold the audience’s attention. The performances overall are appropriately up-tempo.