Paddy Lyons
(Glasgow University)
… it is something to have seen The School for Scandal in its glory.… It
is impossible that it should now be acted. Its hero, when Palmer played it at
least, was Joseph Surface. When I remember the gay boldness, the
graceful-solemn plausibility, the measured step, the insinuating voice – to
express it in a word, the downright acted
villainy of the part, so different from the pressure of conscious actual
wickedness, – the hypocritical assumption of hypocrisy, which made Jack so
deservedly a favourite in that character, I must needs conclude the present
generation of play-goers more virtuous than myself or more dense … (Charles
Lamb, 1822)
My topic is performance history, on the
edge between text analysis and cultural study.
I’ll begin from a witness statement.
In 1822 the essayist Charles Lamb set out an account of two different
performances of RB Sheridan’s The School
for Scandal, first of all describing how it was played in the late
eighteenth century, with the actor Jack Palmer taking the leading role. Palmer
had such success with the role of Joseph Surface in the 1777 premier that he
continued to play Joseph till his death in 1796. Lamb contrasts the eighteenth
century production with the versions that had come to predominate in the
nineteenth century, and I want to outline how Lamb’s evocation of Palmer uses a
vocabulary akin to that of Brecht, when he laid out his recommendations for
renewing theatre performances in the twentieth century. In other words, Brecht describes as
improvement and advance a mode of theatre that to Lamb seemed sadly done with
and lost. We’ll look at a short passage from The School for Scandal, to try and focus on what’s at stake.
Here I’ll briefly move backwards from the
eighteenth century, to consider – with small examples from Congreve, Wycherley
and Dryden - the somewhat different placement and containment of Brechtian
moments in late-seventeenth century Restoration theatre. I’ll then return to
the eighteenth century, and hope to illustrate how it could accommodate the
Brechtian approach evident in John Gay’s The
Beggar’s Opera, 1728. Though not a
principle of eighteenth century theatre, Brechtian elements persist in the
third quarter of the century. This I’ll try
to illustrate with examples from the career of the famous actress Mrs Kitty
Clive, drawing on her own play The
Rehearsal (premiered 1750, and published 1753), and on the role created
for her in David Garrick’s A Peep Behind
the Curtain (1767). It appears that her repeated take up on a Brechtian
device became an aspect of Mrs Clive’s own stage persona.
To finish I’ll come back to Sheridan, via
Alain Badiou’s comments on Brecht, and will look at the dramaturgy of Sheridan’s
play The
Critic (1779), to ask to what extent - or not - this
connects the play to the anti-colonialism which became a feature of Sheridan’s
subsequent career as a parliamentarian.
My attention throughout has been on
theatre, but it remains for discussion how far the devices and interfacing encountered
through this investigation of drama may be usefully carried over to study of
prose and of poetry of the era. It’s also a matter for debate whether Charles
Lamb was indeed correct in his claim that Brechtianism became closed off
through the wish for moralizing that he attributes to the audiences of the nineteenth
century.
