At the Irish Rep, there’s a new production of Dion Boucicault‘s 1841 farce, London
Assurance. Here’s their
boilerplate description:
In this
high-spirited farce, the vain and lustful Sir Harcourt Courtly travels to Oak
Hall to meet his bride-to-be, the charming young Grace Harkaway,
whose hand comes with £15,000 a year. But when the beautiful and vibrant
Lady Gay Spanker joins the party, Sir Harcourt becomes too enamored with her to
notice that Grace is falling in love with his young son Charles, who has
arrived in disguise, pursued by his creditors! A parade of eccentric characters
and merry mishaps ensue in this classic comedy of manners.
It doesn’t seem to be a very
profound play, in terms of whatever social conventions it was satirizing; it’s
a period confection and that’s how director (and Irish Rep artistic director) Charlotte Moore handles it. She’s
usually never less than an efficient director, though efficiency doesn’t serve all
pieces with sufficiency…but here, her straight-ahead approach is just the
thing. She understands not only the archetypes of farce that Boucicault
exploited, but what they give contemporary actors to riff on; and as well, and
this is the most important thing, understands the importance of playing farce
for real stakes: meaning casting and direction in which actors with comedy
chops play toward laughs, but don’t give away that they know they’re
being funny; which keeps everything within the sacred realm of identifiable
human foible. This is a harder tightrope to walk than you’d think, because
period farce brings with it a certain heightened delivery, as the character
names indicate. There’s Craig Wesley Divino as Dazzle, Meg Hennessy as Pert, Ian
Holcomb as Young Charles Courtly,
Elliot Joseph as Cool, Brian
Keane as Max Harkaway,
Colin McPhillamy as Sir Harcourt Courtly, Rachel Pickup as
Lady Gay Spanker, Caroline
Strang as Grace Harkaway, Evan Zes as Mark
Meddle, and Robert Zukerman as Adolphus Spanker.
Excellent design completes the
package.
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