When The Curtains Rise | by Shreya Vardhan
Sampling British comedy on the Boston stage. S
eated snugly in the Lyric Stage Theatre on a windy afternoon in Boston, I waited for the curtains to rise on One Man, Two Guvnors with some considerable eagerness. The play promised to provide intelligent humour for its own sake — the kind of humour that is, I believe, better tolerated on the stage than it is in books, which are unfortunately rendered irrelevant when they fail to touch on Greater Issues. In that respect, I was certainly not let down: the play was as “irrelevant” and irreverent a comedy as I’ve ever encountered. The idea of a British comedy about servants and masters inevitably brought P.G. Wodehouse — whose brilliant and explosively hilarious books have been the constant companions of my youth — to mind. The humour in the play was, however, rather different from the kind I’ve loved in those books; what I found was both less and more than what I’d expected. While there were only a few moments of sublime wit that really, instantly made me laugh out loud, there was a kind of lively joviality in every movement and spoken word that left me with the feeling that I had been laughing all through. I could sense this ubiquitous laughter even in the catchy country songs the orchestra played in the minutes leading up to the show. Flipping through the program as the seats around me filled up, I read about the lengthy and interesting path through time and space that the story had tread on the way to this stage. It began life as Carlo Goldoni’s 18th century Italian play, Servant of Two Masters, set in 1700s Venice. This original production was influenced in large part by the Italian tradition of commedia dell’arte, where masked actors who perfected the depiction of specific characters improvised stories centered around their characters. While both Servant of Two Masters and Richard Bean’s adaptation of it to Brighton of 1963 — the play of the present name — were scripted rather than improvised, the real sources of laughter were still clearly the people with their multifarious absurdities; the plot seemed simply to follow from the explosive intersections of these absurdities. We first meet the cynical and worldweary Charlie “The Duck” Clench, who grudgingly agrees to let his (somewhat dimwitted) daughter Pauline marry the The Harvard Independent • 09.26.13
love of her life, the aspiring actor Alan (my personal favourite, for his ability to come up with heartfelt rhapsodies of the following kind: “My love is ethereal, pure. Like the kind of water you’re supposed to put in a car battery.”), after the sudden death of her former betrothed, one conveniently wealthy Roscoe. His decision arises less from empathy than convenience: the wedding sausages have already been ordered. Complications arise, however, when a couple of new characters arrive on the scene: Roscoe’s sister, the feisty Rachel, disguised as her dead brother in an attempt to extract dowry from Charlie, and the mysterious Stanley Stubbers, who turns out to be Rachel’s betrothed (and, incidentally, Roscoe’s murderer). The principal character, however, turns out to be the bungling manservant Francis Henshall, who by a series of circumstances and the prospect of an extra dinner comes simultaneously into the employment of both the impersonating Roscoe and Stanley Stubbers. Hilarity ensues as Francis clumsily juggles the letters, messages and orders of his two guvnors while trying to conceal the existence of either from the other, and pines all the while for a meal. The curtains of the title are entirely metaphorical in the case of this performance; the scene changes were accompanied by cheery choral interludes (the musicians perched high up in the corner of the room certainly helped create some of the most delightful moments of the play), while the actors went about removing or adding furniture or changing the background in sight of the audience. This produced an interesting comic effect, and seemed to intimately involve the audience in the creation of the story. The theatre itself was small and intimate, allowing plenty of eye contact between the actors and the viewers. The sense of proximity to the stage and the story created by this structure was taken to an entirely new level as the play went on. Francis, as his confusion and hunger grew over the course of the story, increasing appealed to the audience for assistance, advice, and food, and improvised amusingly to incorporate their responses. As matters finally came to a head in a scene where the beleaguered butler had to prevent his two guvnors, dining in the same restaurant, from discovering
each other while trying to serve both (and continuing, of course, with his own quest for food), a member of the audience was called on for help and made to follow a hilarious and thoroughly perplexing series of instructions: carrying and concealing large dishes of soup, lunging to hide behind statues or under tables. The audience thus had a vivid and hilarious share in all the fluster and bewilderment. This touch achieved the same elusive effect that traditional oral forms of storytelling create by acknowledging and appreciating the fact that the telling of a story creates a new story. Once the protagonist’s hunger has been satisfied, love takes precedence, and he sets out, still blunderingly, to win the heart of Charlie’s attractive bookkeeper Dolly. As the stories of the three couples intertwine, the audience finds itself in store for a whole new range of dramatic experiences: One pair of lovers tiffs and doubts in an immaculate drawing room while another jumps into a well within minutes of each other, each believing the other to be dead. Fortunately, they discover each other and choose to live after all. This is the point where wit, wordplay and slapstick comedy all rise to a thoroughly delightful pitch to create a memorable climax. Acting is, of course, of even greater significance in a play that revolves around the peculiarities of its characters, and yet the actors never seemed quite over the top. The distinction between Alan’s “acting” throughout the play and that of the others was amusing. The muddleheaded Francis, in particular, seemed entirely to fill up the stage with his distraught “soliloquies,” brilliant combinations of ridiculous, panicked words and hysterical gestures. At the end of the day, the players’ clearly evident enjoyment of their roles and lively improvisation contributed perhaps most greatly to the delight of the audience. Shreya Vardhan ’17 (shreyavardhan@college) also wishes more people would read P.G. Wodehouse and highly recommends his Jeeves and Blandings books to everyone.
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