She Stoops to Conquer by Oliver Goldsmith (review)

My favourite part of Martha Henry’s production of She Stoops to Conquerat the Avon Theatre in Stratford, Ontario, this past summer [2015] was not the set (though it was inspired), nor the costumes (though they were colourful), nor even the performances of a clearly talented cast, but rather the stranger seated beside me, guffawing his way delightedly through each of the production’s bold and boisterous scenes. The man’s laughter was not a planned element of the production, of course. Yet his enthusiasm spoke eloquently to the play’s appeal, even among audiences not necessarily well-versed in the traditions of eighteenth-century comedy. (So, too, did the number of spectators thronging the theatre on the night I attended the show.) Too often we forget, reading these plays on the page, the contemporaneity and vivacity they can take on in performance. Henry’s production—for me and for the stranger seated next to me—was a potent reminder.

For the most part, Henry wisely allowed this vivacity and contemporaneity to emerge organically from Goldsmith’s artfully constructed script, rather than enhancing it with modern dress or unnecessary anachronisms. Costumes followed the fashions of Goldsmith’s era, and the performance concluded, as did so many plays in the eighteenth-century theatre, with a lively and catching jig. The two noticeable alterations Henry did make to eighteenth-century tradition worked—for the most part. The first was Douglas Paraschuk’s brilliant set design, which paid tribute to that tradition while updating it for a twenty-first-century theatre (with a generous budget). Paraschuk created the three main settings of the play—the country estate of the out-of-touch Hardcastles, the country inn where Charles Marlow and George Hastings foolishly ask Tony Lumpkin for directions to the Hardcastle home, and the garden where Lumpkin leads Mrs Hardcastle round and round in circles—by way of three rotating triangular columns, featuring a different scene on each of their three sides. The scene changes, effected by turning each of the columns a third of the way around, called up the shifting flats popular in Goldsmith’s day but made room for more elaborate decor. At the same time, they echoed key themes of a play in which characters continually travel in circles, mistaking one place for another. We might laugh as Marlow mistakes the Hardcastle estate for a country inn and as Mrs Hardcastle mistakes her own garden for a distant land, but Paraschuk’s ingenious set reminds us that the theatre depends on such mistakes—and on the audience’s willingness to believe that the same square foot of stage space can transform, at the mere turn of a column, from a lady’s bedchamber to a rowdy pub.

Henry’s second update to an otherwise historically accurate production was in the acting styles of her principal performers, whose emphasis on realness and believability seemed somewhat more attuned to modern sensibilities. “We have all been adamant that these characters shall be real,” Henry writes on behalf of the cast, in her director’s notes in the program. “No ‘style’ acting, no ‘Post-Restoration’ acting (whatever that is, anyway). The whole cast has worked very hard to make sure these characters live and breathe.” Henry perhaps overstates her preference for real characters—did the actors in the original “post-Restoration” production of Goldsmith’s day somehow fail to “live and breathe”?—and some of the additions designed to emphasize the characters’ reality seem unnecessary. (The pet duck that she and actress Lucy Peacock imagined for Mrs Hardcastle’s character occupies a central place in the set, for instance, but from my cheap seats I had a hard time discerning the lump of fluff as a duck or the duck as a key to Mrs Hardcastle’s character.)

That said, most of the performers oozed charisma—Joseph Ziegler’s Mr Hardcastle and Peacock’s Mrs Hardcastle achieved the perfect balance between affective credibility and affable cartoonishness, and...