The actual table
Dear friends and readers,
Last night Jim and I went to the Folger Shakespeare theater to see an adaptation of Susannah Centlivre’s The Basset Table. I want to recommend seeing it, urge readers who live in the DC area or not far away to come and enjoy. They (everyone involved it seemed) gave it their all, and it’s a rare treat you won’t see again soon.
It’s not a great production which somehow conveys some deep inner life and feel of the play (the way the fairly recent Folger Clandestine Marriage by Colman and Garrick and years’ ago Dryden’s Marriage a La Mode as altered by Giles Havergal( were; but The Gaming Table is entertaining, pleasurable, funny and the updating does not change the play much at all, merely prunes and makes it more understandable to a modern audience.
I was sufficiently aroused to come home and read the play for the first time in my life — till after midnight. I had read Centlivre’s A Bold Stroke for a Wife and The Wonder: A Woman Keeps a Secret previously and John Wilson Bowyer’s well-written, informative, insightful book, The Celebrated Mrs Centlivre (as you see recommended), but never went on to read any thing more as in these two plays (whatever Bowyer said and however unconventional her life until she married the king’s cook), Centlivre’s texts seemed to me so conventional, the language without inner poetry and the themes mildly cared about (lukewarm), but this rendition made me read anew. I now felt Centlivre’s proto-feminism, ardent witty defense of strong women and pleasure (including at the gaming table), the real theatrical possibilities of her scripts. The flaw in the play’s thematic stances (muted in this production) is its condescending snobbery to Mr and Mrs Sago, citizen and wife. The production did all it could to give it a forward thrust since Centlivre’s text also lacks the kind of clinching incident which makes a play a suspenseful experience whose ending we look anxiously or amusingly towards: they had for all the characters very colorful dazzling even costumes, using cliches to the limit, all the laughs were played up broadly, the acting was good and delivery of lines sharp and apt. Especially strong is Tonya Beckman Ross as Mrs Sago; she deliverered the new prologue and epilogue and starred in the Folger’s previous production of Marivaux’s Game of Love and Chance:
For a moment one felt a little of the fun between audience and actress that the prologue and epilogue tradition of the 18th century encourages. The verse was clearly a modern imitation of 18th century verse and referred to our theater, experience, lives and hers as actress-Mrs Sago too
The stage was a series of stairways up and down, criss-cross, with an upside light on one wall (that was never explained). There are so few stills from the production online that I can offer only this photo from a rehearsal:
But you can see the whole theater set up for this play here on the recent banner of their promotional ads for the Folger:
The loss here was a sort of Chekhovian lingering on the feel of the milieu in the text itself, an invite simply to feel awash in the diurnal sweetness of life (I allude to Tallyrand) which since I last saw it captured for an 18th century text in the 1983 BBC Mansfield Park film, the director (Eleanor Holdridgeg) and adaptor (David Grimm) are not to be blamed for. It seems the way modern productions usually feel the way to make audiences like 18th century plays is to as gaudy, antic, and (when they understand it) coolly ironic as possible. the refusal to try for depth of feeling (I admit) made me nod off during one lull where I could see how Centlivre was moving counters round on a stage, but it was not for long). Well the plays are that but they can be more.
However, not to cavil as probably the people putting on these productions knew their audience and the house was full and seemed very pleased by the end. Some of the funniest scenes were of the young ardent scientist woman, Valerie (Emily Trask) and her sweet lover who also wants to marry her for her money, Ensign Lovely (Robbie Ray), a kind Tom Jones avant la lettre character. Centlivre got in some early hits against cruelty to animals:
Lady Reveller: Oh, barbarous! killed your pretty Dove. [Starting]
Valeria: Killed it! Why, what did you imagine I bred it up for? Can Animals, Insects, or Reptiles be put to a nobler Use than to improve our Knowledge?
and perhaps was an early devotee of the English navy (she appears in this production to make fun of her dislike of the French). Michael Milligan did Sir James Courtly as a gay male and I think had in mind a performance by a brilliant English actor I saw a long time ago as Oscar Wilde (himself) in a Wilde play; he was all suavity and salacious self-control (he seemed hardly to move but with steathly nuance) and innuendo: his wig was huge and his costume glittered. Perhaps because I over-idealize or romanticize what Anne Oldfield must’ve been I was disappointed in Julie Jesneck as Lady Reveller; she didn’t revel enough, but was more intent to reject the lovelorn (abject in this production) Lord Worthy (Marcus Kyd). Ashley Ivey as Buckle, Worthy’s servant, stole some scenes and we feel for him very much (and are meant to) when Worthy slaps him hard (I hope not as hard as it sounded). Michael Glenn as the good-natured Captain Hearty and Micheal Willis as the stern tyrant father to Valeria did their easy bits.
Still I came away remembering Tonya Beckman Ross as Mrs Sago, and it is she backwards that the Folger has chosen to use as their gravatar:
There is an accompanying exhibit only a tiny part of which we got to see: of women writers and women in the theater. It had not yet opened! There was only the room with paraphernalia about Centlivre: real cards from the era, a frontispiece which showed this production imitated some of the details of the costumes, a life of Centlivre. Over at the National Museum of Women in the Arts a lecture on Centlivre is scheduled as well as a new show called “Women Artists from the Louvre, Versailles and Other French National Collections.” (Centlivre’s plays are much influenced by early 18th century French plays, showing her dislike of French was not complete.) We mean to go. Probably the choice of Shakespeare’s Taming of the Shrew is meant to fit in, but I would much have preferred and it would be even more fitting to re-do (as I once saw the RSC do at the Kennedy), Fletcher’s rousing Tamer Tamed
Perhaps Marguerite Gerard’s Angora Cat is something in the spirit of passages in Centlivre’ concoction.
See my Margaret Woffington and Francis Abingdon: hard-working girls in a material world.
I saw the play this afternoon and enjoyed it immensely. Regarding the set, my husband made the clever observation that the upside-down staircases and candleabra low on the wall recalled a playing card, with the classic half-rightside-up and half-upside-down design. I read also that the designers were influenced by modern casinos, where any sense of time or day/night is excluded. Very interesting staging.
I don’t see Sir James Courtly as gay — foppish yes, but since he falls hard for one woman and is implied to have had an affair with another, it doesn’t seem likely.
It was part of a convention that the type of man Sir James stands for — a beau, effeminiately over-dressed — was seen as at least bisexual. I grant it does not seem to be strong in this play, but the actor was imitating another actor playing Wilde in a play I saw in London. Thank your husband for that insight into the upside down staircases and candleabra. It sounds right. E.M.