February 17, 2011
By Staff Reporter
The theater’s normally limited, even cramped-looking playing area has, in James Morgan’s clean-limbed scenic design, taken on a new look so open, even airy that it almost seems as though the walls have been pushed a few feet beyond their usual confinement in order to allow fresh freedom of movement for the richly costumed participants in Goldsmith’s 1773 comedy of country life on an estate some distance north of London.
Morgan’s little miracle has been achieved by painting the Rep floor with an expanse of faux marquetry and then covering the stage walls with a large assortment of portraits and paintings extending far beyond the stage itself and almost into the space occupied by the audience.
It’s very nearly possible to feel the fresh rural breezes moving through the rooms of the comfortable estate where Goldsmith’s mainly earnest characters bumble their way through the twists and turns of his convoluted plot, with its abundant confusions, misunderstandings and petty schemes.
Trevor R. Griffith in his introduction to the 1999 British “Drama Classics” edition of the play writes: “The central mistake of ‘She Stoops to Conquer’ was, he claimed, based on one of his own errors when he mistook a gentleman’s house for an inn.”
That crucial miscalculation may be a bit hard to swallow on the face of it, but it serves to get Goldsmith’s sly comedy moving along.
Mrs. Dorothy Hardcastle, a slightly dim country hostess, had been married before her comfortable alignment with Mr. Hardcastle. That first marriage left her a widow, and also lumbered her with a son, Tony Lumpkin, a pranksterish, vaguely tricky lad of 20 something who has become something of a problem around the domicile in which his mother is conducting her second marriage.
Mrs. Hardcastle, for her part, admits that she has never been to London, a city she admires, and whose social comings and goings she follows diligently with the help of the newspapers and journals that come into her dwelling.
The surname playwright Goldsmith assigned to the product of Mrs. Harcastle’s first matrimonial venture, Lumpkin, may provide some indication of his feelings about the level of his characters’ sophistication.
While the countrified Hardcastle family and their associates hardly qualify as outright bumpkins, they are certainly less vicious, less back-stabbing and, it must be admitted, less adroit verbally and infinitely less conniving than the tart-tongued Londoners who populate such plays as “The School for Scandal,” written in 1777, just four years after the first production of “She Stoops to Conquer,” by another Irishman, the Dubliner Richard Brinsley Sheridan.
In addition to Mr. And Mrs. Hardcastle and Tony, the family also includes the doyenne’s young niece, Constance Neville, whose considerable fortune is controlled by her aunt.
Mrs. Hardcastle hopes to marry Constance off to Tony, and Lumpkin, who doesn’t fancy the match, is in no position to refuse, since he is, or is thought to be, underage and therefore not in complete control of his own destiny.
The Hardcastles, as the play opens, are expecting company, in the person of young Charles Marlowe, the son of a family friend, a landowner named Sir Charles Marlowe. Young Marlowe, it is hoped, will prove a suitable suitor for the hand of Kate, the daughter of the household.
Marlowe is traveling with his friend, George Hastings, who is in love with Constance.
When Marlowe and Hastings stop at a country alehouse in order to break their journey, they encounter Tony Lumpkin. carousing with his friends. When Marlowe inquires of Tony where lodging might be found, Lumpkin, conforming to Goldsmith’s need to get his plot rolling, directs them to the Hardcastle house, but tells them it is an inn.
And so it goes. Marlowe treats Mr. Hardcastle as though he were an innkeeper instead of a gentleman and a householder.
When Marlowe, clearly off his game, has his first encounter with Kate Hardcastle, he proves to be tongue-tied and inarticulate. Kate, hoping to give him another chance, poses as the barmaid of the “inn,” hoping he’ll be more at ease with the “lower classes.”
Believing the ruse, the handsome, but shy, Marlowe reveals his articulate, seductive nature and woos the “barmaid.”
Meanwhile, Tony steals Constance’s jewels, which constitute the bulk of her inheritance, and gives them to Hastings, who has implored Lumpkin to aid him in a plot to elope with the vulnerable young heiress.
Director Charlotte Moore has assembled one of the Rep’s strongest casts for “She Stoops to Conquer,” with veteran Patricia O’Connell, Tim Smallwood and Danielle Ferland, all of them salty and zesty as, respectively, Mrs. Hardcastle, Tony Lumpkin, and the “she” of the title, Kate Hardcastle.
New to the Rep are two familiar vets, Remak Ramsay and Donald Grody as Hardcastle and his friend, Sir Charles.
But much of the charm and luster of the production can be chalked up to the sterling work being turned in by a quartet of youthful actors, only one of whom has ever worked at the Irish Rep before the current production, which is scheduled to run through June 26.
Tommy Schrider, the show’s agile, clever George Hastings, was seen three seasons back in the group’s off-kilter “tribute” to the city of Limerick, “Pigtown,” so named because that’s where Ireland’s pork processing industry was long located.
The three remaining players, the newcomers, make strongly genuine impact with their contributions to “She Stoops to Conquer.” As young Charles Marlowe, the sturdily appealing Brian Hutchison proves to be that rare item, a credible romantic lead who can handle difficult language with abundant style and grace.
Jennifer Bryan’s Constance Neville is everything it should be, dewy-fresh but nevertheless intelligent and self-possessed, while Lucas Caleb Rooney has a small field day with the part of Diggory, the Hardcastle household’s man-of-all-work.
Rooney is also entrusted with the sly Prologue which humorist Mark O’Donnell wrote at the behest of director Doug Hughes, who wanted something fresh with which to kick off a production of the play he was staging for the Tyrone Guthrie Theatre in Minneapolis.
Linda Fisher’s rich, amusing costumes add immeasurably to what stacks up as one of the Irish Rep’s best and most enjoyable shows ever.