Caroline Courtships
[In the following review, Potter finds Shirley's Hyde Park banal and overly slight, despite fine performances by the actresses in the three lead female roles.]
A play written for the spring opening of Hyde Park in 1632—comedy of manners with a dash of local colour—must have seemed an appropriate opening too for the new season at the Swan. But Shirley's play Hyde Park poses more problems than one might expect. It isn't very funny. Nor, though written in verse, is it poetic (Lord Bonvile's little aria, “Lady, you are welcome to the spring”, on which John Carlisle lavishes his most dulcet tones, is a rare example of the “compliment” for which the author's contemporaries admired him). The dialogue is chiefly characterized by a rather colourless realism, with much of the vagueness, hesitation and banality of ordinary conversation. This makes it hard to follow. Shirley can find his way around Caroline society, but cannot tell a stranger how to get there.
The Park is only one of several settings for the intertwining courtships of several people of leisure. They watch foot and horse races, drink syllabub, and guess at their success in love (like Milton in an early sonnet) by whether they first hear the nightingale or the cuckoo. The cuckoo dominates, and a surprising number of men are left unpartnered at the end. But the women, however “wild” they claim to be, are all paired off. No one makes any real attempt to defy conventional morality. In fact, no one does anything much: apart from one unlucky competitor, the racing involves the cast only as spectators.
Though the programme is full of information about Caroline London, the only pointer it gives to the nature of Barry Kyle's production is a reference to the “Hyde Park Gate News” which Virginia Woolf edited at the age of eight. The play has been reset in arty Georgian London. Trier is a society painter; Fairfield and Carol look a bit like the young Rupert Brooke and the not-so-young Virginia Woolf. The stage is dominated at first by Trier's elegantly decorative portraits of the female characters. Then, in the final scene, when everyone brings wedding presents for Lacy and Mistress Bonavent, Lord Bonvile arrives with Van Dyck's “Charles I on Horseback”. The portrait watches over the remaining action, except when Bonvile, interrupting his seduction attempt, turns it to the wall.
A joke, or a symbol of the return to chivalric values which war will soon bring? The women sometimes seem dimly aware of the coming change, but are powerless to bring it about. A suffragette approaches Mistress Bonavent and Carol in Hyde Park, presumably on her way to throw herself under a horse; one woman is disgusted, the other quizzically amused. Julietta, whose fiancé has had the bright idea of leaving her alone with Bonvile to see whether she can cope, is so frozen with horror when he starts taking her clothes off that she can only carry on moralizing, instead of dashing for the door. Her words, amazingly, are able to stop the ageing roué in his tracks. Even Felicity Dean's beautiful performance cannot explain how. Carol, who literally sums up the play—her name suggests birdsong, dance, and King Charles—is played by Fiona Shaw as a clever neurotic, badly in need of a room of her own, who takes out her frustration by tormenting her suitors. All three women eventually succumb to authority figures. Mistress Bonavent (touchingly played by Pippa Guard) unhesitatingly abandons the young man she has just married when her previous husband, a middle-aged army officer, turns up after seven years' absence. Julietta exchanges the weak-kneed Trier for the supposedly repentant Bonvile. Carol determines to marry the only man able to take a tough line with her contrariness.
Transplanting the play solves the problem of creating an atmosphere free from the associations of Jacobean and Restoration comedy. But it creates other problems. It is hard to watch a play about Bloomsbury while listening to one about Caroline London, especially when, as on the first night, the music drowns some crucial lines. Moreover, Kyle, though he uses a very full text, keeps slightly more information from the audience than Shirley did, for the sake of a more effective ending. (The programme text, incidentally, no longer indicates alterations.) More seriously, the intelligence that has obviously gone into this production is too much of a burden for the play to bear. Despite a sympathetic cast, with outstanding performances from three fine actresses, it remains an example rather than a critique of triviality. For a genuinely critical view of Caroline social and dramaturgical conventions, you have to go to Richard Brome. How about reviving him next year?
Get Ahead with eNotes
Start your 48-hour free trial to access everything you need to rise to the top of the class. Enjoy expert answers and study guides ad-free and take your learning to the next level.
Already a member? Log in here.