✭✭✭✭✩

by Dion Boucicault, directed by Antoni Cimolino

Stratford Festival, Festival Theatre, Stratford

August 22-October 25, 2024

Sir Harcourt: “I consider it a duty which every gentleman owes to society to render himself as agreeable an object as possible”

In presenting London Assurance by Dion Boucicault this season the Stratford Festival becomes perhaps the only theatre company in North America ever to have staged two productions of the play. Stratford’s first production of the play was in 2006, directed by and starring Brian Bedford in a role perfect for his talents. The present production does not have the elegant style of the former one and is marred by certain weak performances. Yet, it does have enough strong performances to outweigh these and chance to see such a seldom performed play is one most theatre-lovers would be loath to miss.

Irish-born playwright Dion Boucicault (1820-90), author of more than 200 works for the stage, is probably best-known today as the author of the abolitionist melodrama The Octoroon (1859), an important work in the history of 19th-century American drama and the object of satire in Branden Jacobs-Jenkins’s play An Octoroon (2014).

London Assurance is important in the history of 19th-century British drama as one of the few plays from period 1800-1850 that is still performed. Boucicault wrote the play in imitation of Richard Sheridan, famous for The Rivals (1775) and The School for Scandal (1777), and it stands as a link between the comedies of the late 18th century and later 19th-century comedies like Engaged (1877) by W.S. Gilbert, The Philanderer (1893) by G.B. Shaw and the plays of Oscar Wilde.

In 2006, I summarized the action thus: “The story centres on the ageing London roué Sir Harcourt Courtly, who intends on carrying out the provision of a deceased friend’s will that he marry his only daughter Grace Harkaway. The country girl Grace is only 18 but she also plans to honour her father’s will since she does not believe in love – that is, until she meets an attractive young man calling himself ‘Augustus Hamilton’, who is in fact, Sir Harcourt’s only son attempting to flee his London creditors. Meanwhile, Sir Harcourt finds himself less attracted to Grace than to the delightfully named Lady Gay Spanker, who seems to regard her wimpish husband Dolly as a doormat. Egged on by Charles’s enigmatic friend Richard Dazzle, Lady Gay enters into a plot to unite Charles and Grace while shaming Sir Harcourt”.

Fops and dandies have been a source of satire in British comedy since George Etherege made fun of Sir Fopling Flutter in The Man of Mode (1676). In London Assurance Boucicault outdoes all previous fops in the person of Sir Harcourt Courtly, for whom clothes and makeup are everything. As Harcourt, Geraint Wyn Davies does not have the arsenal of tricks that Bedford so well used to provoke laughter in a play and ally the audience to his character. Instead, Wyn Davies turns Harcourt into a kind of mollycoddled version of Falstaff from The Merry Wives of Windsor who has never been to the countryside, much less to war. Everything outside the city and the concerns of the “ton”, as they might say in Bridgerton, are completely unknown to him. Wyn Davies draws humour from Harcourt’s acute self-centredness, his childishness and his inadaptability. As usual Wyn Davies is a model of diction and is adept at having Harcourt say the most ridiculous things with the utmost seriousness of demeanour.

Sir Harcourt’s object of affection turns out not to be Grace but Lady Gay Spanker. Deborah Hay endows the character with an indomitable joie de vivre that lights up the stage whenever she appears. Unlike Harcourt, Lady Gay loves country life and active pursuits like hunting and shooting. She wears the pants in her household and feels it’s the natural order of things. Hay turns Lady Gay into the dynamo of the play whose love of life completely overwhelms Harcourt’s foolish love of fashion.

Boucicault has conceived of Grace Harkaway as a kind of anti-ingenue. Unlike the ingenues of Molière, Grace is a cynical young woman who does not believe in love. She therefore would as soon marry an old man as anyone. Of course, as soon as she meets “Augustus Hamilton”, her views change. Marissa Orjalo is a real find. Unlike so many young actors, she knows how to project and modulate her voice. Orjalo seems aware that initially much of the humour of Grace comes from her uttering statements so contrary to her character type. Orjalo also knows how to make Grace’s falling in love a treat by emphasizing how Grace finds herself in new and uncharted territory.

Orjalo projects a strong personality but it’s unfair that she should have to do the acting for two in her scenes with Austin Eckert as Harcourt’s son Charles. Eckert declaims all his lines in the same unmodulated voice whether Charles is drunk, angry, in love, and worst, when he is playing Charles as studious and dull. He physically distinguishes Charles the student from Charles the rake simply by adopting stooped shoulders and pigeon-toes and never varying from that position.

Stratford veteran Graham Abbey plays the income-seeking lawyer Mark Meddle. This is a minor character but Abbey seems not to have got the memo. Abbey plays Meddle louder and bigger than any other character. Though he is made up to look like an old man, Abbey jumps and capers about as if the character Meddle were young.

The normally dependable David Collins does not seem to have much of a handle on Grace’s uncle, Max Harkaway, except that he is a congenial older man. On opening night Collins had a tendency to muddle important information in his speeches which was no help to the plot.

Emilio Vieira is an ebullient Richard Dazzle. As Lady Bracknell says of Algernon in The Importance of Being Earnest, “He has nothing, but he looks everything. What more can one desire?” Dazzle claims to be a gentleman but spends his time living off others, rather like the arch-sponger Harold Skimpole in Dickens’s Bleak House (1853). Dazzle thinks he can extend Max Hartley’s invitation to the wedding at Oak Hall to two years. Vieira lends his character charm and indefatigable optimism which cause no one to question Dazzle’s origins. It would help Vieira if Cimolino brought Dazzle out of the shadows more often and if designer Francesca Callow, who has created so many outré costumes for Sir Harcourt, had made her costumes for Dazzle dazzle as would befit his name.

Beside Wyn Davies, Hay and Orjalo, Rylan Wilkie as Harcourt’s servant Cool has the style of the period down perfectly. Like a Jeeves ahead of his time, Wilkie’s Cool is never flustered and smoothly does what he can to help both Harcourt and Charles achieve their aims.

One of the most delightful performances comes from Michael Spencer-Davis as Lady Gay Spanker’s milquetoast of a husband, Adolphus, known as “Dolly”. Davies somehow plays the meek, attention-avoiding Dolly so well that we can’t help but notice him every time he’s on stage. Even the thin, whiny voice Spencer-Davis uses and his lack of gestures, make Dolly a perfect comic portrait. Spencer-Davis is especially fine when Dolly gets drunk and for a brief moment tries to stand up to Lady Gay.

Antoni Cimolino’s direction brings out a vitally important theme of the play that reveals it as more than a frothy entertainment. We first see it in how well he positions Sir Harcourt and Lady Gay as opposites. Though most of the characters of the play think of men and women in terms of ancient stereotypes, Boucicault clearly shows Sir Harcourt with all his concern about clothes and makeup to be the more feminine while Lady Gay with her love of riding and shooting is the more masculine of the two. To have two such characters who flout convention not just in their habits but in their opinions and behaviour represents an early questioning of gender roles that, unlike Shakespeare, is based on mentality, not disguise.

Cimolino also highlights this theme in the seeming reversal of roles of Lady Gay and Adolphus, where Lady Gay is “man” of the household who tells the “woman”, Adolphus, what to do. We could dismiss this as simple henpecking, as Sir Harcourt thinks, but Boucicault shows this is not the case. When Dolly is faced with having to fight a duel, he wants Lady Gay to help him out of the situation. When Dolly does go off to fight, Lady Gay exclaims, “Poor Doll, I didn’t think he cared so much about me” and does go off to help him. Actors Deborah Hay and Michael Spencer Davies have played the role reversal of husband and wife in such a way that we already know Lady Gay and Dolly are happy in their roles, unconventional as that may seem.

When Brian Bedford directed and starred in the play in 2006, he naturally made it into a showcase for his craft. Cimolino’s direction in the present production, despite its flaws, reveals that Boucicault’s play itself is much more forward-thinking as a play than one might have supposed. The play demonstrates that women are as adept, if not more adept, at running things than are men and that notions of what man a man or a woman are are not as fixed as people may think. London Assurance is an hilarious, eye-opening rarity I am happy to have had the chance to see again.

Christopher Hoile

Photos: Geraint Wyn Davies as Sir Harcourt Courtly; David Collins as Max Harkaway, Marissa Orjalo as Grace Harkaway (in pink), Graham Abbey as Mark Meddle, Deborah Hay as Lady Gay Spanker, Emilio Vieira as Richard Dazzle and Geraint Wyn Davies as Sir Harcourt Courtly; Marissa Orjalo as Grace Harkaway; Deborah Hay as Lady Gay Spanker and Michael Spencer-Davis as Adolphus Spanker. © 2024 David Hou.

For tickets visit: www.stratfordfestival.ca.