Lovers’ Vows: Melodrama

Tonight is the night! It’s time for Opening Night, to reintroduce Elizabeth Inchbald and Lovers’ Vows to the world of theatre, where they both belong. We are thrilled for the opportunity to share this play with you all and to restore Inchbald’s reputation as a master of the stage. It is difficult now, having lived and breathed this show for months, to imagine how this play could have vanished, largely remembered only as ‘the play in Mansfield Park’, considering how much fun it IS, how popular and controversial it WAS, and how illuminating that controversy and by extension the play as a whole is into the gender politics of the time, especially considering that it was written by a woman [you’ll have to read my dramaturgy notes for a fuller but still laughably incomplete exploration of that controversy -KH]. I do have a guess as to why it may have been cast aside, however, and very conveniently for me and fortunately for you it is an explanation that dovetails nicely with an element of our staging that I can call out and discuss with you. That idea, of course, is the Melodrama. I think that the formulaic nature of melodramas makes it easy for people to underestimate and ignore them, and I think that the elements of melodrama in Lovers’ Vows may have unjustly hurt its reputation in the historical record.

What do I mean by melodrama? It is one of those words that is easier to understand through examples than by definition, but the core elements are exaggerated characters, obvious plot points, outsized reactions, and utter sincerity in production. It has some elements, the exaggerated character types and formulaic plot structure, in common with Italian commedia dell’arte, Spanish siglo de oro, and Japanese Noh plays. Lovers’ Vows is not a full melodrama (see our director Kerry McGee’s director notes for more information about the line that it walks) but it shares some of these traits with the pseudogenre. It is not as by-the-numbers as some of Inchbald’s earlier plays, in which she used descriptor names to indicate the morality and traits of the characters; a common form of literary shorthand you may recognize from, among other places, Nathaniel Hawthorne’s The Scarlet Letter, in which the villain is named Chillingworth [no offence to any readers named Chillingworth, but it is an objectively sinister name -KH]. But the play is no mystery, and while surprises by the handful are in store for the characters, the audience is unlikely to be shocked by any of the revelations. It is a style that rewards fidelity to structure, that draws energy and humor from its rigidity to form.

And if you know anything about our approach to staging challenges, and specifically my analysis of our approach to staging challenges, is that we love to Lean In. Finding what makes a play tick and emphasizing it. In this case what makes the play tick is traditional execution. So we are executing the play traditionally.

From We Happy Few’s 2019 production Lovers’ Vows. L-R: Jessica Lefkow as Agatha, Lee Ordeman as Baron Wildenhaim, Jack Novak as Frederick, Gabby Wolfe as Amelia, Alex Turner as Anhalt. Photo by Mark Williams Hoelscher.

We are putting the show in a straight proscenium, no tricky inversions or thrust configurations or in-the-round shenanigans. A proscenium focuses the audience’s attention on the stage, paints the same picture to every member of the audience, defines the playing space, contains the action. This show doesn’t want to conceal anything or trick the audience, leave ambiguity about where the action is taking place or what is motivating a choice. It wants to hide information from its characters but make that information abundantly clear to the audience. So our proscenium emphasizes the reality of the world on stage and reassures the viewer that they can trust their perceptions and their assumptions. And, more importantly, that they can trust us.

We are playing in period costumes. No ambiguity about the time or place that the play is inhabiting; we want it to be abundantly clear that we are in rural Germany in the mid to late 1700s. More importantly and unusually for us, we also have no on-stage quick changes. Everyone is who they are. We don’t want the audience to spend time or energy thinking about who or what else a character could become, we want them to focus on who they are and what they are doing in the moment. Unlike many of our shows, everything on stage is exactly as it seems, and our clarity in costuming emphasizes that the audience should trust their senses and us, the players, to deliver on their expectations of the world we are inhabiting.

From We Happy Few’s 2019 production of Lovers’ Vows. Background: Jessica Lefkow as Agatha. Foreground: Jack Novak as Frederick. Photo by Mark Williams Hoelscher.

Melodramas and other form-driven plays live or die by their execution. The point isn’t to surprise the audience with revelations, it is to reward their understanding of story structure and impress them with the clarity and fidelity with which the story is implemented. I think we’ve done a pretty good job of establishing the world of Lovers’ Vows, introducing and typifying the inhabitants, and delivering exactly the kind of story that Elizabeth Inchbald wanted to share with the world. But I am a little biased. It is up to you, the audience, to judge if our execution is up to snuff, so I encourage you to join us and see for yourself.

Lovers’ Vows: Literary Pedigree

Hi there everybody! It’s time for my first blog post of the season, and you know what that means: we’ve started rehearsals for an upcoming show! We will be opening this season in early November with Lovers’ Vows, by 18th-century novelist and playwright Elizabeth Inchbald, based upon the German playwright August von Kotzebue’s Das Kinde der Liebe [literally The Child of Love/Love-Child but occasionally translated as The Natural Son -ed.]

Unless you’re a student of 18th-century German theatre (or, surprisingly, political history), and if you’ve found your way to this blog post you may just be, you’ve almost certainly never heard of Kotzebue. He was a minor but reasonably popular author who was most famous for his murder as a “traitor to the fatherland” at the hands of Karl Ludwig Sand, a pro-German Unification student, during one of Germany’s many unfortunate flirtations with nationalism. I’m not especially interested in talking about him.

Of much greater interest to me is Elizabeth Inchbald, the actress, playwright, novelist, and critic who you’re also unlikely to have heard of. She is MUCH more interesting and I will certainly be digging deeper into her life at another time, but for now what is most relevant as regards her is that she wrote the play Lovers’ Vows, which we are staging this November and which you might have heard of if you worked your way deep enough into Jane Austen’s bibliography to read Mansfield Park, in which this play features prominently.

From Company Picture’s 2007 Mansfield Park. L-R: Joseph Beattie as Henry Crawford, Billie Piper as Fanny Price, Joseph Morgan as William Price, and Blake Ritson as Edmund Bertram.

Grateful as we are to Jane Austen for choosing to immortalize this play by its inclusion in Mansfield Park, it is worthwhile to speculate why she would do so. What purpose does it serve in the story and, more importantly, why she specifically chose THIS play, instead of the dozen or so others that Tom Bertram proposes. There is a simple answer that Austen supplies in the text, which also happens to be part of our own reasoning for selection: “They wanted a piece containing very few characters in the whole, but every character first-rate, and three principal women”. But there are some more thematically complex reasons that are worth exploring as well.

THOUGH I WILL DO MY BEST TO OBFUSCATE AND SPEAK IN GENERALITIES THIS BLOG POST WILL INCLUDE SOME SPOILERS FOR BOTH LOVERS’ VOWS AND MANSFIELD PARK. READ ON WITH CAUTION BUT ALSO IT WILL MAKE MORE SENSE IF YOU’RE FAMILIAR WITH AT LEAST ONE OF THEM.

First, a convenient inverse-similarity exists between many of the characters of the two stories, most noticeably the confident and forward Amelia and her retiring but righteous tutor Anhalt in the play, and in Mansfield Park the meek protagonist Fanny and her insufferably prudish and sanctimonious cousin/crush Edmund, perhaps the least likeable of Austen’s male love interests [What is it with characters named Edmund? King Lear, Narnia, this, all Edmunds are terrible -KH] {Edmond Dantes, star of our upcoming Count of Monte Cristo, gets a pass because he changes his name ~KH}. There are also comparisons to be made between Agatha and Fanny’s cousin Maria Bertram, both of whom loved not wisely but too well, and between Amelia’s father Baron Wildenhaim, and Fanny’s uncle and guardian Sir Thomas Bertram, who have differing views of their wards’ judgment and their own moral authority. And also a direct 1:1 similarity, with no ironic double meaning or inversion, between Austen’s Henry Crawford and Count Cassel, who both demonstrate feigned sincerity and inherent aristocratic respectability covering their shallow lusts. By happy coincidence almost all of these mirrors happen to align the actors in Mansfield Park with the characters they would have played! The only exception is Sir Thomas, who not only wasn’t going to appear in the show but also shut down the performance when he returned from his business trip to Antigua and ordered every copy of the play in his house burned. These mirrored characters and their in-play actions foreshadow their actors’ fates in the second half of Mansfield Park, a sort of preview of the story for those readers in the know.

[It is not impossible that there exists a reference to Mansfield Park in my personal favorite book, Jonathan Strange and Mr. Norrell, also, as the fate of the fiery Maria Bullworth in JS&MN seems to mirror that of Maria Rushworth nee Bertram eerily closely, with the role of notorious rake Henry Crawford being played expertly by the villainous Henry Lascelles. This has nothing at all to do with Lovers’ Vows and I don’t know what to do with this information, or even know for certain that it is an intentional homage (although those names are very similar to each other), but I noticed it and I cannot now fail to bring it up, because my mind is broken in a Very Particular Way which makes it impossible for me to stop talking or thinking about Jonathan Strange and Mr. Norrell. -KH]

From Susannah Clarke’s Jonathan Strange and Mr. Norrell, 2004, chapter 36, All the mirrors of the world. L-R: Maria Bullworth, Jonathan Strange, Christopher Drawlight. Illustration by Portia Rosenberg.

On a broader level, Sir Thomas’ and that tattletale Edmund’s reactions to the allegedly prurient and offensive Lovers’ Vows (which dares to suggest that a woman should be honest and proactive in her desires, and that a man should be held at least as accountable for his actions as a woman) allows Austen to satirize the outrageous moral standards of her time. She contrasts the dangerous moral of the play, which ends with communication, understanding, satisfaction, and love between all parties, with the unsatisfying “happy ending” of Mansfield Park, in which seduction goes unpunished, the outspoken learn their place in meek servitude to their elders and betters, and the obsequious and passive are rewarded for their servility. Clearly a play with such a progressive and subversive message would truly be too dangerous to even see, much less perform, in this sort of society.

Fortunately for us, we now live in a world that, while still very bad, is not quite so upfront about its hatred and fear of transgressive art, nor so successful at restricting it, as the world of Mansfield Park. None of our dads even tried to burn our scripts when they found out what show we were doing. Please join us in November for the show, celebrate our freedom to stage a comparatively unknown but once extremely controversial show and see what all the fuss was about! Tickets are on sale now!