While students began to pick sluggishly through their past months’ class notes in review for exams last weekend, actors in the main--stage production of Oliver Goldsmith’s She Stoops to Conquer, directed by Tracy Ginder-Delventhal, projected their best stage voices, laughed in spasms of onstage revelry, carried or threw each other across the set, and rolled around on the ground on Thursday, Friday, and Saturday February 14th-16th.
While the constant, full-force slapstick was a little hard for this reviewer to take, it certainly provided all of us who attended with some comic relief from this final lap of the winter term. This production of the 1773 play made its physical comedic dimension most prominent, but much of they play’s humor also revolves around mistaken identities, caused by the tricks of mischievous young Tony Lumpkin, played by Michael Noel ’09, and his half-sister Kate Hardcastle, played by Learah Lockhart ’08.
The play first introduces us to the parents of these characters: Mr. Hardcastle, an old-fashioned country gentleman (Benjamin Pascale ’08), and his wife Mrs. Hardcastle (Emily MacLeod ’08), who wishes they could “take a trip to town now and then.” Disdainful, Mr. Hardcastle turns the question around: “I wonder why London cannot keep its fools at home?”
That same night, in fact, London sends two more their way, in the form of young Marlow (YoonJin Ha ’08) and his friend Hastings (Miles Cozart ’09). The play’s subtitle, The Mistakes of a Night, most accurately describes what follows.
The next scene, the only one to take place outside of the Hardcastle estate, occurs in a nearby ale house, nicely marked in this production by its staging in front of the lowered curtain. Marlow and Hastings arrive at the ale house, where Tony, along with others, has been partaking of the ale.
The dastardly Tony tricks Marlow into thinking Mr. Hardcastle is a mere innkeeper, rather than the man whose daughter he has arrived to court, so that Marlow will treat him “impudently.” Then Mr. Hardcastle’s daughter tricks Marlow into thinking she is a mere servant, so that he treat will her with a similar lack of “reserve”—and so that she sill have a better chance of understanding and conquering him.
Hastings, meanwhile, falls in love with Tony’s cousin Constance Neville, played by Amy Gobel ’08, who spent much of the play en pointe. Yet more tricks ensue—this time with Mrs. Hardcastle as the victim—in order to allow Hastings and Miss Neville to escape with Miss Neville’s jewels. This trickery culminates in a wonderful scene in which Tony leads his mother at night out into their own garden, where, having asked the servants to dress up as statues and statuettes among unfamiliar plants, he makes her believe they have lost their way in “Cracked Skull Common.”
While all Tony’s and Kate’s trickery flitted back and forth before the audience’s eyes, so did lively, extravagant costumes and wigs, provided by costume director Deighna DeRiu—though luckily the clothing seems to withstand all the rough use by cast members . Mr. Hardcastle’s odd two-horned white wig stays on his head for almost the whole play, slipping around on occasion but only being removed to reveal his bald head twice. Mrs. Hardcastle did not lack prominent locks either: in one scene she wore a magnificently-constructed, bright-colored ship atop a sturdy wig.
Marlow and Hastings also wear extravagant outfits in each, Hastings at one point donning a pair of shoes that seemed to sport life-size white rabbits on their buckles. The set, designed by Leslie Hammond, sports the heads of dead game on walls and an owl on the mantelpiece, against a striped backdrop. Dark and sober on one half but pastel and cheerful on the other, the wall was divided down the middle corresponding to two portraits, by Sonja Hawden ’10 and Sonia Ruyts, of a man and a woman. The caricatured quality of the set corresponded well to the comedy without taking the audience’s attention away from the action.
In fact, how could anything take the audience’s attention away from the action, with the actors engaging in such unremitting acrobatics? Perhaps these acrobatics themselves distract somewhat from plot, character development, and other such things, but no one can really complain about a cartwheel or somersault. The characters themselves do not complain but make the most of what comes to them—and, naturally, a happy ending does eventually come. At that point, only Mrs. Hardcastle complains: “Pshaw, pshaw, this is all but the whining end of a modern novel.”
But the audience must disagree with Mrs. Hardcastle. While the mid-eighteenth century sentimental novels she refers to have mostly passed into obscurity by now, Doctor Goldsmith’s play She Stoops to Conquer most certainly has not.
Mr. Hardcastle has a typical meeting with his rambunctious servants before the guests arrive. PHOTO/ian Morris
