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A Chaste Maid in Cheapside By Thomas Middleton |
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Directed by William Gaskill February
1966
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The
Cast
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Sir Walter
Whorehound…. Davy (his
servant)…….…. Welshwoman…………….…. Sir Oliver
Kix…………………. Lady Kix………………………. Allwit……………………………. Mrs. Allwit…………………….. Wat…………………………….. Nick………………………….…. Wetnurse…………………….. Touchwood
Senior………… |
Sebastian
Shaw Joseph Grieg Nerys Hughes Ronald
Pickup Avril Elgar Christopher
Benjamin Frances Cuka William
Stewart Dennis
Waterman Nerys Hughes Tony Selby |
Mrs.
Touchwood (his wife)…………… Touchwood
Junior (his brother)……. Yellowhammer
(a goldsmith)……….. Maudlin (his
wife)………………………… Moll (his
daughter)………………………. Tim (his
son)……………………………… Two
Promoters………………………….. Country Girl………………………………... Two Puritans………………………………. Parson……………………………………….. |
Gillian
Martell John Castle Bernard
Gallagher Jean Boht Barbara
Ferris Victor Henry Richard
Butler, Timothy Carlton Lucy Fleming Gwen Nelson,
Gillian Martell Roger Booth |
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Plays and Players March 1966 |
“Jacobean Bawdy” Reviewed by John Russell Taylor |
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All things considered, there is really
a lot to be said for commerce. If there is anything the history of the arts teaches
us unarguably, it is that fine intentions butter no parsnips: art emerges
much more often from the efforts of some entirely unpretentious craftsman
meeting a deadline than from the lofty aspirations of a self-appointed artist
calmly sitting in his ivory tower bent on producing art. Middleton always
seems to me an excellent practical example of this: he had fewer recorded
pretensions than any other Elizabethan-Jacobean dramatist and from what
little we know of him he seems to have been content simply to pour out plays
(alone or in collaboration), pageants, pamphlets and poems just as demand
offered, and with not the slightest thought that he might be producing - as
Webster, Jonson and even Shakespeare certainly thought-works of art which
could last for hundreds of years. And yet, perhaps because of this, his plays
remain as revivable and continuingly entertaining as almost any of the
period, and to my mind considerably more so than the more literary,
deliberately artistic plays of Webster or Jonson. I have enjoyed productions of The Changeling and Women
Beware Women as much, I think, as any modern revivals of Jacobean drama I
can think of (it can hardly be chance, incidentally, that these were the two
which, enticingly billed as bloody melodrama, came over so well to mass
audiences on independent television last year), while I am sure that A
Trick to Catch the Old One and perhaps Michaelmas Term would
revive as well. I would have thought so too, I must say, about A Chaste
Maid in Cheapside, and so I am left wondering why, with all the auguries
so favourable, I found the net result of the Royal Court's new production so
unsatisfactory. Certainly the
programme note, which presumably represents the views of the play's director,
William Gaskill, strikes an encouraging note. Middleton is presented to us as
the author of 'bawdy plays. . .venery and laughter, to keep you in an afternoon
from dice at home in your chambers'. Which is true of this play at least, but
hardly true of the way it is here treated. There is nothing wrong with bawdy
humour-far from it-and there need be nothing embarrassing about its delivery
in front of a reasonably intelligent, sophisticated audience such as the
Royal Court usually attracts, provided it is put over with conviction and
even relish. But the trouble here is that the production is, in general, slow and
lacking in buoyancy, while the individual actors called upon to deliver the
bawdier lines look so shame-faced about it that instead of laughing as we
should we come merely to share their embarrassment. Observe, for instance,
John Castle, as stiff-necked, correct, a young Englishman as you could hope
to find, trying to put over the suggestive double-entendres given to the
romantic hero when he is busy gulling a wedding ring for his beloved out of
her unwitting goldsmith father; as he mumbles the lines about having her
measure concealed about his person and so on, he looks as though he could
sink through the floor, and any unholy enjoyment we might otherwise derive
from them sinks with him. Christopher Benjamin, as Allwit, the joyful cuckold
well-paid to bring up his bastards discreetly and hold his tongue, does a
little better with his rougher pieces of invective, but even he seems to be
bracing himself as though to withstand some outraged reactions from the
audience, and so again his more outrageous sallies at the expense of the
greedy gossips fall flat. However, I must
not seem to suggest that the play stands or falls entirely on its blue jokes.
They are not so many or so constant as that. And anyway, they are not there
for themselves alone: an important part of their function is to fill out the
rich, varied and vividly idiomatic picture of London life at the start of the
17th century which Middleton presents. It is more as a panorama than anything
else that the play works: the plot, full of confidence tricks, disguises, substitutions
and last-minute revelations, is neither here nor there; some fairly drastic
editing of the sprawling text has not, perhaps, greatly helped matters, but
anyway Middleton's strength in this play lies more in the individual pearls
than in the precise way they are strung together. Unfortunately, a
number of details in this production seem designed with almost willful
perversity to minimize the very qualities in which the play itself is
strongest. The set, for instance, a ruthlessly hard, bare design with a lot
of wooden boards relieved only by two almost equally undecorated,
uncompromising blocks representing houses at the back and a curtain beyond
with a greatly enlarged engraving of Jacobean London on it, is a chillingly
uninviting stage upon which to spread the expansive, luridly coloured wares
the dramatist has to sell. To make matters worse, the costumes in which this
very exactly, essentially period piece is played are made vaguely (very
vaguely) Edwardian, thereby getting the worst of both worlds: remote enough
in period to make us see it as a period piece, modern enough to make us overconscious
of the disparity between how the characters look and how they talk. What the
purpose of all this may be, beyond simple economy, I could not say; but if
economy was uppermost in the producer's mind, it was surely false economy,
since this is the sort of play which must be done absolutely right or not at
all. As will be
gathered, I did not enjoy myself much at A Chaste Maid in Cheapside, and
I am more than usually at a loss to account for the ecstasy into which it
threw most first night critics. Perhaps I suffered from some extreme
second-night reaction on the part of the actors, but even so I cannot think
that the production's general terms of reference could ever permit it to be
absolutely first-rate. As usual, even in the adverse conditions I have
outlined, I still admired some of the company's acting, particularly that of
Ronald Pickup in the unlikely role of the ageing and rather idiotic knight
Sir Oliver Kix, who cannot manage to impregnate his wife unaided, however
hard he may try, that of Avril Elgar as his hatchet-faced wife, and that of
Frances Cuka, Joseph Greig and Gwen Nelson in smaller roles. But in general
the whole thing remained, alas, more interesting as a demonstration of how
not to manage Jacobean comedy than entertaining in any less specialized
fashion. |
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