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The Projector, The Mock Mason, and Miss Littlewood GEORGE DORRIS • ON 1 DECEMBER 1970, Theatre Workshop presented Joan Littlewood's production of a play, The Projector, at the Theatre Royal in Stratford East, London. This was announced as the first performance since the eighteenth century of a play by William Rufus Chetwood, formerly called The Mock Mason, which had been given for only one performance at Goodman's Fields on Friday, 13 April 1733. According to the program note, this ballad opera "seems to have been the only one to have been closed as a result of political pressure." A riot was said to have been caused by ruffians hired by a "Dutch builder, Cornelius Van Dort, who had been attacked in contemporary pamphlets as 'Tumbledown Dick' on account of the shoddiness of his tenement buildings." Then an account of a theatre riot is quoted from The Flying Post for 14 April 1733. The Projector treats of a rascally builder, Van Clysterpump, who speculates in real estate, leasing houses which he hasn't built and bribing corrupt officials to allow him to put up shoddy buildings. When these collapse in the second act, the guilty parties frame an innocent young man who knows too much. Fortunately he is rescued at the last minute. Other characters include a transvestite lord (who seduces the young hero in a scene reminiscent of The Relapse), two drag queens, a bawd, and a braggart soldier. The play makes amusing use of many eighteenth century devices, although amid the eighteenth century pastiche are a number of distinctly twentieth century elements. This combination of the period and the topical is, of course, the point of the production, as the program note makes clear: Ever since 1968 when the tower block of flats at Ronan Point, a mile or so from the Theatre Royal, Stratford, collapsed in mysterious circum265 266 GEORGE DORRIS stances, Joan Littlewood has wanted to present its story on the stage. Then John Wells came across, in a book of old plays published in 1751, "The Projector" by Chetwood, a play based on a situation with so many similarities to the 1968 story that we hope it will still appear topical. Since Miss Littlewood is enjoying a bit of erudite mystification with this play and its history, it may be worthwhile to spell out some of the details of her joke. According to The London Stage, 1660;.1800, a ballad opera called The Mock Mason by Chetwood was indeed given for only one performance at Goodman's Fields on 13 April 1733.! However it was a one-act work, played as an afterpiece to The Constant Couple for Chetwood's Benefit, while The Projector is in two rather full acts. Of the characters in The Mock Mason Sir Jaspar, Clerimont, Noodle, Doodle, Davy, Caelia, Lettice, and Jenny only Jenny appears in The Projector, although Noodle and Doodle are listed among the walk-on parts. Despite the program note's reference to an edition of 1735, which describes The Mock Mason, now called The Projector, as "Retitled and slightly Revised by a later Hand," there is a suspicious discrepancy in these accounts, especially as the British Museum catalogue lists no play called either The Mock Mason or The Projector under Chetwood, while both the edition of 1735 and the later one of 1751 are unknown to the editor of The London Stage. Genest provides the answer in Some Account of the English Stage: The Mock Mason is the comic subplot of Chetwood's "tragi-comi-farcical ballad opera" The Generous Free Mason turned into a self-contained farce on the occasion of his Benefit.2 If The Mock Mason is otherwise unknown to history, The Generous Free Mason is better known. And its title explains part of Miss Littlewood's joke, for The Projector involves building frauds, and therefore stone-masons, while Chetwood's masons are strictly of the fraternal kind. The Generous Free Mason; or, The Constant Lady: with the Comical Humours of Squire Noodle and his Man Doodle was the second ballad opera by Chetwood, the promptor at Drury Lane and the author of The Lover's Opera. It was first performed on 20...

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