Review: The Recruiting Officer at The Stamford Shakespeare Company

 The Stamford Shakespeare Company are an institution in the local area. Founded in the sixties, various machinations have meant they are in the very enviable position of having a permanent theatre, quite a coup for an amateur company. More than this, it’s an outdoor venue (pre-dating Regent’s Park’s outdoor theatre) in an area of pretty gardens and an oldish building, Tolethorpe Hall, as the backdrop. 

Judging by the costuming and set design, they may also be one of the most solvent amateur theatre groups in the country - last year I saw The Woman in the Van, a production that included three vans. In my time reviewing productions over the last year and a half, I reckon the Stamford Shakespeare Company are richer than most professional companies. 

It creates a strange, quite magical and very English phenomenon. On a performance level it involves amateur acting (though often very good amateur acting), supported by more-than professional budget in an event that is a centrepiece for the local area. 

What happens is, the great and the good (and the wannabe or thinktheyare great and good) from Rutland, Cambridgeshire, the posh bits of Lincolnshire, like the Deepings and such, all congregate on this manor house and gardens. There they park their cars (ours was parked near small gravestones for ‘Gypsy’ and a number of other cats) and carry picnics through to the grounds. My mum is a powerful picnic maker, but even her efforts are dwarfed by people who bring chairs, tables, tablecloths, flowers in vases, candles in candle holders, silver cutlery…it’s a heaven for Hyacinth Buckets. 

After this elaborate feast, the picnics are packed up and the people are called to the auditorium, inside for the audience, outside for the performers. The stage is ringed by bushes and trees and there is usually an elaborate set, sometimes with multiple levels. We went to see George Farquhar’s The Recruiting Officer. There were shops on one side with a shambles and fruit stall that was also accessible on a higher level. Behind was a simpler ‘house’ set and a full standing market hall. Coming up are a full cast in period dress, a little clumsy swordfighting, a bunch of jokes - some of them working, some of them not, and a folk band.

I’ve been to see the Stamford Shakespeare Company a number of times - although, I’m not sure I’ve ever seen the Shakespeare, that’s usually earlier in the summer than when I visit. There have been some very good plays, the newer ones I’ve found the best, particularly The Lady in the Van. However, the play is definitely just one part of the wider experience. This would likely be my last chance to visit though and I was pleased it was coinciding with an 18th century piece.

I thought The Recruiting Officer quite a bold choice for a company most comfortable in Shakespeare, Wilde and Noel Coward. Eighteenth Century stuff simply doesn’t have the cultural ubiquity to make it easy to approach as a performer or an audience, lacking the prestige of earlier theatre and relatability of newer. This is especially true of Farquhar’s work, coming at the beginning of the century and essentially being the last gasp of restoration ‘humours’ comedy.

In the backdrop of the recent successes of the War of Spanish Succession, a group of grenadiers come to recruit for their regiment in the mostly sleepy town of Shrewsbury. The main recruiter is Sergeant Kite, a man perfectly suited for recruiting work because of his full list of vices. He’s perfectly happy to flim-flam, trick or bully a person into the service for the commission he will get. At one point he even poses as a fortune teller, in order to get the people of the town to accept the army as their fate.

His commander is Captain Plume, well loved of the town and its magistrate, he’s also beloved of his daughter until her older brother dies and she is now worth much more. Will she (or more importantly, her father) settle for a simple captain now. In a similar position is Squire Worthy, his beloved, Melinda, has also come into some money and is using that to punish him for his presumptions towards her during their early courtship. To add to his problems, he has a rival suitor in Captain Brazen, an extravagant fop.

One of the historical elements that I was most excited about was that The George, the hotel I stayed at during my earlier successful trip to Lichfield and my recent unsuccessful one, claimed to be the place Farquhar stayed when he was himself a recruiting officer and the inn and town were inspiration for a number of plays including The Recruiting Officer. How distressing then, that the play says it takes place in Shrewsbury. However, there is a reference to watching the clocks of the churches of St Mary’s and St Chads - both Lichfield churches. Indeed, Samuel Johnson was to be baptised there a couple of years after the play was performed.One of Davey Garrick’s first productions was an amateur production of The Recruiting Officer, in which he gave himself a plum role.

Talking of plum roles, Colley Cibber had a huge hit with his take on Captain Brazen, the outré fop, but fops were his speciality. I really need to write a bit more about him and his fascinating family at some point.

As for the 2024 performance at Tolethorpe, how was it?

One problem with an old comedy is not spotting the jokes that are right there, the other is creating jokes out of nothing. This production was guilty of both these sins. There was a particularly modern elision of the camp inherent in the fop character and homosexuality. Not that there wasn’t a little of that then, but it was an era where men did sometimes wear makeup and often had high heel shoes and ribbons and such. It was fashionable to speak in a fop-talk and lard as many foreign phrases as possible. Really the fop should be understood as closer to hipster or something of that ilk - and to have him cop a feel of Captain Plume whenever possible doesn’t really understand what a fop was. 

What’s more, there were an awful lot of “gay..hehehe” jokes for a modern production. I suppose the audience at Tolethorpe skews old and such Are You Being Served jokes still land well - but a younger or more metropolitan audience would have been perplexed at the attempts to create laughs out of gay panic. Jokes that weren’t really in the text. There were the misunderstandings of ‘the fop’ as a character, but there was also a lot of misunderstanding of how common it was for people to bunk up together. That the soldiers shared beds wasn’t a terrible indication of gayness in the military, simply a reflection on poor pay and limited bed space.

It was also one of the more indifferently directed plays I’ve seen there. A lot of clumped blocking, not very good use of a large stage, with people in tight areas throughout. The sword fight and the pistol duel weren’t really maximised for comedy or suspense. There was a scene with a man hiding under a table during a crystal ball reading that felt like it had a lot of potential on the stage (such as the table leaping about the stage as the crystal ball reader says its possessed) that didn’t fully cohere in the cramped tent set they were using. 

There was a very good scene involving lots of innuendo about breasts of chickens and the breasts of the chicken seller, and the comic pairing of Costar and Tom was very good. I also enjoyed the performance of Brazen, who had the theatricality of the fop down pat, especially the way Brazen fumbles for a heightened elegance he never quite reaches. 

I had a lot of pleasure going to see The Recruiting Officer and I’m sorry I probably won’t get to be going to see the Stamford Shakespeare Company for a while. If you want to experience something very unique, next year they are playing it safe with two Shakespeares and an Oscar Wilde.  

600th Post: SPECIAL ANNOUNCEMENT

I’m very happy to announce that my novel Death of a Dream-Pedlar is now available from Amazon as a paperback or an ebook.

My launch price for the paperback is £10 and the ebook is 99p. Naturally I recommend the paperback.

In many ways, this book has been some time coming. I started a short story with many of these ideas in 2005, a chunk of the book formed my Masters dissertation in 2009 and I first finished it and tried to get it crowd funded in 2014. 

Ten years later, heavily re-written and here it is, actually coming out. Part of that has been laziness, part of it life, part of it the insistence that only standard agent-publisher publishing is the only legit kind. I’ve rather come around to self-publishing as the only really Grub Street approach to new publishing - but I’ll write another piece about that.

It’s funny all the comments I’ve got from agents. So many pieces of praise, so many agents describing the book (and me) as wonderful or great but always the ‘but’, they thought many people would really enjoy the book but they didn’t know how to place it in the right market who’d try it in large numbers.

So here it is.. I’ve tried to solve those problems myself. “A mystery, a lark, a look at the nature of dreams and a celebration of the triumph over suicidal ideation - Death of a Dream-Pedlar is a lively exploration into a curious world with an unforgettable heroine.”

And to make it easier to try… the ebook is only 99p., Be brave, give it a go.

Oh, and I just made a hardback also.

Review: A couple of anonymous children's books about animals.

I had fun the other month looking at Newbery and children’s literature. When moving house, my books were sadly orphaned from me so I had to resort to my Kindle. Having prepared for this by mooching around Project Gutenberg, especially the ‘anonymous’ section. A lot of these listed anonymous works ended up being children’s books printed in the first decades of the nineteenth century, which eighteenth century scholars have annexed for themselves.

Here are mini-reviews of two animal stories.

 Published in 1815 by Whittingham and Arliss in Paternoster Row, The Surprising and Singular Adventures of a Hen as Related by Herself to Her Family of Chickens, purports to be the life story of a fowl.

This book is doubly anonymous, as neither the actual writer, nor the hen of the title have a name. She’s aware that “all animals write their lives nowadays”, and it certainly was a thing then, but she feels she still has a story to contribute. The chief thing the hen brings to the animal tale (way in advance of Watership Down and The Animals of Farthing Wood) is gore and misery.

Her mother is killed in the first page. Her two brothers die starvation soon after and then the rest of her nest-mates. She is, however, rescued by a little girl and made a pet of. A kindly chicken calls in to her and offers to teach her to ‘scratch for myself’ but our hen doesn’t see much use in that, as her every whim is catered to. It’s quite a culture shock then, when she is forced out into the farmyard with the other chickens.

One night, in the coop, a fox gets in. The elderly hen still shudders at this memory and asks, “how can I describe the horrors of that bloody scene?” It’s genuinely quite chilling when the chickens realise the savage monster in their midst. She survives that and is passed about, before being stolen by some children who decide to make a cock-shy of her. This was an entertainment where a chicken (usually a cock) was tied to a post and people paid money to throw sticks at it until the cock died.

Spared from this horrible fate, she lives with a lovely young boy, who takes her to his boarding school. The other boys find his attachment to the fowl rather strange and laugh at him for it. Then, two boys read about when Diogenes plucked a hen and declared it Plato’s man and decide to do that to our hero-hen. So they pluck her alive and she describes the pain and blood she endured. The naked hen thrown at the boy, he takes her back to his house where his sister makes her well.

Unfortunately for the hen, the family have dinner guests and one is a bit of a prankster. When asked to bring a dish to a sharing lunch, he decides he wants something with a little flair and bakes a pie crust and puts the hen in it so she’ll burst out at the right moment. He also shoves her up a chimney so she again bursts out and frightens everyone into thinking she’s a ghost.

The family then go on holiday and the servants, not knowing that she is the favoured hen, choose to fatten her up. She describes the boredom of sitting in the narrow space with nothing to do but eat and the discomfort of her rapidly swelling body, so much so she looks “forward to the time when the murderer’s knife would end my miseries.” cLuckily she is rescued and gets to live the rest of her life in peace… but if this story teaches a reader anything, it’s that they wouldn’t want to be a Regency era chicken. Though I suppose chickens have it hard in every era of humanity.

This book had a couple of other little pieces to bulk it out. There was a naff analogy called Pity, which described what an anthropomorphised version of that emotion would be. There was a little story called The Drunkard, in which a king played a Christopher Sly type trick on a drunk man.

Most peculiar of all was a little playlet called Prince Arthur and Hubert. In this scene, the nephew of Bad King John is to have his eyes stabbed out by an old friend called Hubert. He begins by simple pleading;

Arth: Will you burn out both my eyes?

Hub: I must and will.

Then he appeals to Hubert’s humanity, to their shared history together, then by trying to evoke empathy in Hubert by reminding him how irritating it is when a fly comes into your eye, and how much more it would sting to have them burnt out. Hubert comes close to doing it but eventually relents and the two go off together as outlaws. 

Of course, this little play has never been performed professionally, but I wonder how many nursery performances of this strange little piece were held up and down the country? I can certainly imagine the smug little git who wanted to play Arthur.

The History of a Tame Robin is an anonymous work printed in 1817 by Darton, Harvey and Darton at 55 Gracechurch Street. It tells the story of a tame robin who is passed from owner to owner and valued by many of them for his tame nature and his unusual song. At one point he goes by the name of Bob, but his ‘real’ name is never given.

What’s most interesting about this book is the way it’s a bit of a throwback, both structurally and tonally. It adopts the latinate, ‘elegant’ tone of a classic Augustan novel with the structure of a bildungsroman, interpolated story included.

When the robin is born, his mother is described as enjoying the “arduous, though pleasing office of maternal tenderness” - and the book is full of these stiff, slightly roundabout phrases, rarely indulging in the more direct address of a classic Grub Street production or the simplicity of later works.

In terms of happenings, the robin is essentially moved from one owner to another. Unlike the poor hen in The Surprising and Singular Adventures of a Hen as Related by Herself to Her Family of Chickens, our robin isn’t ever in much real peril and the people he meets are mostly those who have an “affection toward the feathered tribe.” Occasionally, a new owner may be a little more selfish than others he’s met, or view him more as a commercial opportunity than a beloved pet, but things never really get bad for him.

The goldfinch, in the little interpolated tale, does have a few harsher experiences than the robin but is not subjected to the real cruelties that happened to goldfinches at the time. She’s never put in a cage with a heated bottom to keep her perpetually singing, for example.

There are two sudden cases of penury resulting from houses being burnt down, but one of these is simply observed (and used as an example to show the charitable nature of his kind owner) and another is back-story for a different poor, but kind owner.

Everything comes back to it’s beginning, with an ending which is pleasant and elegant - and that’s the main element of this book. It may not be a litany of pain and destruction, like the poor hen, but it is a perfectly well made eighteenth century novel in miniature, and there’s a fair amount to enjoy in that.

Review: Anecdotes of the Learned Pig

 Anecdotes of the Learned Pig is an anonymous work published in On the 12th May 1786 by T Hookham on New Bond Street. 

What caught my eye was that the listed authors were James Boswell and Hester Thrale Piozzi, two people who’d never collaborate together on anything, especially at this time and especially on a book about a learned pig. 

Tony was the original learned pig, and a big deal at the time this book was published. He’d wowed the country by being seemingly able to spell, tell the time and read the minds of women. The year this book came out, his original trainer had been killed and had been passed on to a new owner who had showed him in London and around Europe.

This is not a biography of Toby.

This pig was born in Moorfields, the area famous for both being near Grub St and Bedlam asylum. His mother, a rather learned sow herself, had taken to eating the political and religious pamphlets that were commonly tied to them for people to read. She’s even eaten a copy of Sacheverell’s sermons, after which she was observed to “grunt more and louder”.

One of the pigs born from this litter shared her voracious appetite, and on one raid on Milton’s garden, he ate all the white roses and was severely whipped for it. This gave him a lifelong hatred for Milton. The pig was also almost barbecued during a 5th of November celebration and so had some sympathy for Catholics and the Pope. When he reached maturity, he came close to human speech, saying;

“Gruntledum, gruntledum, gruntledum squeak

I hope very soon to be able to speak

Through my gristly proboscis I find that I can

Already cry ‘ay’ like a parliament man.”

Then came the footnotes. One by Bozzy and one by Piozzi. Both were descriptions of Samuel Johnson but attributed as if they were describing the pig. Then it struck me; references to Sacheverell (who the three year old Sam apparently insisted on seeing), a dislike of Milton, a perceived Jacobiteism… not to mention the bizarre bit where the pig is touched for scrofula.

The learned pig is Samuel Johnson.

The pig is then let loose “idling and rambling”, in reference to Samuel Johnson’s magazines The Idler and The Rambler. There’s a passing reference to the whole Cock Lane Ghost saga, where Johnson was on a panel of experts charged to decide whether a ghost really did visit the girls in their bedroom. The book describes the pig’s “too sonorous gruntulations” and “that big concatenation of bubbles which usually flecked his mouth” - criticisms of his writing and laughing at his physical difficulties.

Any pretence that the book is hiding, or being coy with Samuel Johnson as the target are dropped quickly in the footnotes and even the text itself becomes pretty explicit. The pig has the letters “LLD” branded on it’s rump, the letters of the qualification that Johnson received making him Dr Johnson (a title he didn’t actually like using). His dictionary is described as a manure, where the pig has rummaged around roots and other goodies and created “from his behind, certain rich but crude and ill-digested morsels”.

There are attacks on Johnsons later political works like Taxation No Tyranny by a claim that he had no politics until he was awarded a pension. There’s also the idea that Johnson recognised that, had he been born earlier, he’d have been immortalised by Pope as one of the dunces of The Dunciad like Theobald and Dennis.

After a long career of rootling and manuring, the pig “retired to a brewery in the Borough” where “he was fed with the freshest grains by the fair hand of a fair lady who condescended to be the priestess of our pig”. After that the pig “journeyed into Scotland in the guise of a travelling bear, with a monkey on his back.” These two strange characters, the monkey and the fair maid stayed with the pig and as “he grunted forth, as was his custom, many strange things” they put them “faithfully on record”. That’s Bozzy and Piozzi dealt with.

Throughout his life, the pig is “pretending to cure mental diseases by the medicinal qualities of his tongue”. As someone who has been amused, calmed and often encouraged by Johnson’s writing, I’d vouch for its efficacy.

The book ends on a weird note. After characterisation Johnson as a pig throughout, something dirty and bulky and messy, it concludes “he had virtues and merits enough to make us heartily wish he were still in being”. Even a book written to mock Johnson has to admit the world is poorer without him.