The Ladykillers:Killing it!

‘Father Ted’ writer Graham Linehan’s adaptation of the classic comedy 1955 film starring Alec Guiness and Peter Sellers has been brought to life by The Playhouse Company. 

In this intensely funny production, the audience witnesses the all-consuming power of greed and the extent to which it can drive people. However, this very serious truth about humanity is not conveyed as a deep moral lesson that the audience must learn from, instead it is drip fed to us as we sit watching powerless as one by one the play’s characters ‘bump’ each other off in order to get a greater share of the ill-gotten gains.  

The play opens by immediately breaking down the fourth wall for the audience in the intimate, thrust stage theatre. Constable MacDonald, played deftly by Peter Young, walks confidently through the rows of seats towards the stage to take his entrance. This isn’t the only instance of play literally leaping off the stage; this technique is repeated throughout the production making the play feel very interactive, very alive and very real. All in all, an extremely effective directorial decision!

Constable MacDonald’s first appearance on stage is a house call with lonely widow Mrs Wilberforce (Carol Oddy), whom the audience learns has been making allegations of Nazi-leanings against one of her neighbours. Peter Young’s Constable MacDonald depicts the tired bobby’s humouring of Mrs Wilberforce with finesse throughout the show. This humouring and gentle criticism of Mrs Wilberforce at the beginning of the play is an important detail regarding Mrs Wilberforce’s character which foreshadows the plot’s conclusion. Constable MacDonald implies that Mrs Wilberforce has too much time on her hands and has imagined the whole situation, rather than thinking logically. When ‘the ladykillers’ finally make their appearance, Professor Marcus (brilliantly played by Dominic Gittins) tells them that Mrs Wilberforce is unobservant, so they’ll be able to plan, carry out and even involve her directly in the robbery without her knowing a thing. The best laid plans, and all that? Of course, the audience know Mrs Wilberforce is fairly shrewd, she just has an overactive imagination due to living such a solitary life since her husband died. All this talk of solitude doesn’t sound very funny, does it? However, the production is chockful of flashes of expert comedic timing, misdirection and deadpan delivery. All masterfully carried out by the ensemble. 

Loath as I am to sing the praises of the production’s set after being told that this is the mark of a poor production (I was once told that you know a play you were in is not the best when your friends and family sing the praises of the set and lighting afterwards rather than the play and the performance of your cast mates or yourself), a laudatory word needs to be said. It really was fabulous thought out and impressively constructed. The placement of Mrs Wilberforce’s front door at the edge of the stage right by the audience contributed to the sensation of the cast interacting with the audience and the rattling shelves at the back of the set when a train went passed was magnificent. I shall leave my comments on the set on this admiring note in order to avoid any spoilers: bravo to the stage manager and the rest of The Playhouse Company for such impressive set design and construction!

Finally, a few words on the cast of The Playhouse Company’s production of The Ladykillers. The loveable One Round aka Mr Lawson was portrayed skilfully by William Browne “I’m Mr Lawson”. Romanian Louis Harvey (Tony Maisey) gave an amusing portrayal of the criminal, the highlight of which was the character’s mixed metaphors. Maisey walked the fine line between acting with an accent and not hamming it up dexterously by the way. Harry Robinson (Rupert Curtis) the OCD drug addict was another enjoyable performance as was Major Courtney (Paul Scott) the sensitive crossdressing criminal. Mrs Wilberforce’s friends, the old ladies at the musical performance who are led by Mrs Tromleyton (Caroline Greenwood) were comical caricatures of old aged women. However, Carol Oddy’s endearing portrayal of old age in her role as Mrs Wilberforce stole the show and the hearts of the audience in her sympathetic and poignant approach to the loneliness of the life of a widow seeking companionship. The hilariously, clumsy and energetic Professor Marcus (Dominic Gittins) contrasted beautifully with the sad window into real life that Carol Oddy brought on to the stage in her performance.  

All in all, this is an exciting production of The Ladykillers in terms of the talent both on and off the stage. It should not be missed by lovers of the original film, or by newcomers to the story. 

Now at The Playhouse Theatre in Cheltenham November 2^nd, 3^rd, 7^th, 8^th, 9^thand 10^th2018

Lazy Journalism in Politics

I felt the need to write this piece in the wake of the news that Diane Abbott is stepping aside as Shadow Home Secretary for health reasons.

 https://pixabay.com/en/vote-word-letters-scrabble-1804596/

By many this is said to be the result of a mass loss of confidence in the Labour Party following the two epic gaffes made by Jeremy Corbyn and Diane Abbott in two different interviews in almost as few days. Admittedly Corbyn and Abbott both made silly and highly undesirable blunders at a crucial time in British politics. Some people say that people are rightly questioning their allegiance to the party and whether they should vote for a party who doesn’t know how much what their manifesto policies will cost. For those people Abbot stepping aside is the correct, and only, thing for her to do in order to ensure the success of the Labour Party.

People across the length and breadth of the country are now asking of both Abbott, and the entire Labour Party, if they are unable to recall such an important figure as the cost of one of the policies they want to implement then how “strong and stable” (if I might recycle a phrase I heard somewhere) would they be at running the country? What people are forgetting is that the fact Corbyn and Abbott could not recall the exact figure of one of their policies when asked in an interview with immense pressure on them personally and with a lot at stake is irrelevant. Yes, it doesn’t look good, yes, that sort of error should be avoided when making a radio or television appearance but ultimately it doesn’t matter!

The simple fact is that their errors were pounced on by interviewers keen to humiliate the pair because it makes good viewing/listening. By not letting the matter drop for the moment, or not giving someone the time to respond to a question without being interrupted as Corbyn, for example, asked when he was being interviewed on Woman's Hour and by Jeremy Paxman, creates drama and draws immense public attention to their programme making their show more popular, thus giving them more security in a time of cuts and vast competition from online entertainment. Personally, it makes me question the integrity and intelligence of the interviewer. Could they think of no better questions to fill the short segment that they had been allocated?

Have you ever tried remembering a large amount of numbers? How about trying to learn the date of every battle in British history for instance? Off the top of my head I know that the Battle of Naseby was in 1645, but right now I can’t quite remember when the Battle of Edgehill was. However, if I was going to sit an exam paper on the Civil War I would find out first. So, yes, it doesn’t look good that neither of them knew the answer to the question that they were being asked at that time, but that doesn’t mean that they wouldn’t check before sitting their exam paper, i.e., before implementing their policies. After all, they have a fully costed and approved manifesto so they must have some idea of how much their policies will cost. And before those policies would get implemented they would be brought in front of a full house to be debated, torn apart and finally voted on.

Focusing so deeply on simple human errors like theirs detracts from what’s important during an election. Policies. Yes, we should be asking how much policies cost and there should be an answer to that question (there is, it’s in their manifesto) as well as where that money is going to come from.

But ultimately the most vital aspect of an election is working out what each party stands for, not getting distracted by asking futile (albeit amusing) questions like ‘What’s the naughtiest thing you’ve ever done?’ or ‘Who does the household chores?’. Causing drama and humiliating guests in an interview prevents the nation from getting to the heart of the policies that each of the parties is campaigning for. It’s a distraction from what actually matters. What matters is finding out what matters to the politicians who want your vote. Usually these policies are the reason why that person got into politics to begin with. Surely that should be at the core of any interview with a politician? We should be asking them what matters so that we, the citizens of this nation, can then ask ourselves whether what matters to that politician also matters to us. We should not be basing our vote on which politician performs the best publically. Surely someone’s opinion on equality, health, human rights and people, is more important than whether they look good aesthetically and can charm people with smoke and mirrors or whether they can distract the populace with frivolous ephemera?  

St Groan!

The National Theatre’s production of George Bernard Shaw’s Saint Joan 

As much as I love Gemma Arterton, not even her forceful performance of Saint Joan could rescue this lacklustre production of Shaw’s lesser known play. Whilst I admired the updating of the play to a corporate boardroom complete with large screen displays of stocks and shares, the modern dress costuming for the male ensemble against Joan in medieval costume oversimplified the themes of Shaw's play.

Shaw described Saint Joan as a “play without villains” and by dressing the characters like 1980s boardroom red-braced yuppies contrasting with Joan in traditional peasant garb, the director Josie Rourke simplifies the complexities of Shaw's drama by immediately indicating to the audience that Joan is something other than the men surrounding her, something saintly and pure. Of course by association that posits the surrounding men particularly Jo Stone-Fewings and Elliot Levey as the Earl of Warwick and Cauchon, the Bishop of Beauvais respectively as villains. By doing this Rourke minimises Shaw's message about society’s reaction to people of true individual genius.

Gemma Arterton’s portrayal is really good because it is so simple. She presents St Joan as doggedly dedicated and dangerously persuasive. The male cast argue that her persuasiveness is her danger. When they need her for this skill, they use her, but when they no longer require her to invoke the armies to fight for them they have to get rid of her before more women starting forgetting their places!

The rest of the cast (all male) were also strong. The Dauphin played by Fisayo Akinade was really a highlight of the play. His simpering, puerile boy prince was thoroughly enjoyable to watch and bounced wonderfully off Gemma Arterton’s driven, almost muscular St Joan. Jo Stone-Fewings, Elliot Levey and Rory Keenan were also capable in their roles but sadly the intimacy of the Donmar Warehouse was the best thing you can say about the production. 

There are better National Theatre and RSC productions running at the moment to see than this, which is a pity as Shaw’s play is so rich with theatrical potential.

An Ethereal Dystopia: Review of the RSC's Cymbeline 


Melly Still, the director of the RSC's latest production of Shakespeare's Cymbeline has created a dark, elfin dystopia, which highlights the rather topical issue of national identity already present in the original play. 

There are conflicts within this production as the dystopia seems to foreshadow a post-Brexit war for Britain whilst also aspiring to return to the past to a time of faeries, goblins and gnomes. The costumes certainly have a hint of the fay about them in their tattered, torn layers of tulle most notable in Innogen's costume, which makes a re-appearance later in the play stained with blood. Perhaps hinting at the death of Britain's fairy folk with the imminent war with Rome? This is most evident with Belarius' entrance with his stolen children, Guideria and Arviragus as they emerge singing and dancing from their badger-like sett of a home in the forest. However, the conflict between the desire to return to the past versus the threat of the oncoming future is enjoyable to watch.

Another innovative approach which Melly Still takes is to have a Queen Cymbeline (Gillian Bevan). The impact of having a Queen Cymbeline rather than a King Cymbeline is that there is a more tender relationship with Innogen (Bethan Cullinane). Despite Cymbeline's initial anger at the opening of the play because of Innogen's love of Posthumus played by the talented Hiran Abeysekera. Their young lust results in their secret marriage before Posthumus is banished into exile, with the hope of encouraging Innogen to marry Cloten, her step-brother, played with energy and comedy by Marcus Griffiths. 

Innogen becomes the true focus of this production (to the extent where it might have done well to be retitled Innogen instead of Cymbeline) and this is rightly so. The character is rich with potential. I particularly admired the bold choice to stage her self-discovery  to say it politely. The painfully dark scene wherein Jachimo (Oliver Johnstone) sets about to win his bet by stealing into her room hidden in a trunk and manipulating her vulnerable sleeping body is brilliantly staged with small capsules of humour thrown in to break the tension with much needed comic relief. Arguably the comedy here could be seen to be inappropriate, however I think it makes staging such an unpleasant violation bearable whilst still making it evident that his actions are criminal. Something which sadly still needs to be said today as issues regarding what constitutes rape are argued daily. What then happens to Innogen as a result of this defilement highlights the fragility of women's reputation today as much as in the 1600s. Something which Pisania (instead of Pisanio, another example of the gender exchanges made by Still) played by Kelly Williams makes all to evident when she receives Posthumus's letter instructing her to kill her mistress for her alleged adultery. 

This is a truly fresh look at Cymbeline, one really worth seeing because of its marriage of the play's universal issues of national identity and the role of women. The run is on until the 15th October in Stratford upon Avon before it moves to the Barbican in London from October 31 to 17th December. 

Kit Marlowe; the New King of the Psychological Thriller 
Review of the RSC's Dr Faustus 

Director Maria Aberg has, for me, transformed the legend of the man who sold his soul to the devil into a surreal, Steam Punk cabaret redolent of Gerald Scarfe's illustrations. The accompanying music also supports the re-figuring of the play as a rock opera. When interviewed, Aberg said that when she started working with the composer Orlando Gough they had discussed Tom Waits as the inspiration for the musical style wanting to create a "grotty, sexy quality" as well as "Duckie-style cabaret" as she felt like "it needed to be something fun, dangerous and seductive without being slick" (https://www.theguardian.com/stage/2016/feb/12/maria-aberg-rsc-stratford-doctor-faustus-sandy-grierson-oliver-ryan-christopher-marlowe).

The danger is apparent as soon as the lights dim with the lead actors Sandy Grierson and Oliver Ryan each lighting  a match at the start to determine who plays which character that night. The tension mounts as the flame crawls flickering to their fingertips. The fraught mood is sustained throughout the play even through the punk cabaret of the personified Seven Deadly Sins in their Dali-esque costumes. This breaks into a palpable sense of unease throughout the audience when the child spirit of Helen of Troy child emerges after Faustus has summoned her to him through Mephistopheles to be his paramour.

The Wittenberg scholars in their uniformal suits and matching bowler hats stalk menacingly through the performance punctuating the scenes with a reminder of Faustus' deadly deal and the lead actors, Grierson and Ryan, are excellent. The night I attended, the match had selected Grierson as the ambitious Dr Faustus and Ryan as the cunning, wheezing Mephistopheles, whose voice was surprisingly like Ren of Ren and Stimpy fame! The set was simple but effective and the intimacy of the play was enhanced by its appearance on The Swan Theatre's thrust stage.

Whilst the play is more about Dr Faustus as a man and his motivations than philosophical ponderings on divinity, the after life and God and the Devil, Aberg's production is a very personal and intimate examination of man's failings. She has teased open the already present human elements of the play so rather than a questioning of divinity being the last message of the play, it is instead a questioning of man's desire to be known, remembered and to be a success at all costs that remains with you far beyond the final curtain call.

Still Wicked! 

The Apollo Victoria,  London - 9th of April 2016

I have been wanting to see this production since I heard about it which now feels like forever ago! As I find adaptations fascinating, the idea of this production focusing on the backstory of Oz's Wicked Witch has had me intrigued for sometime. After seeing the production, I'm still intrigued! Whilst I appreciate that there will be many people who have seen this production already I still don't want to reveal any spoilers for anyone yet to see the show, so I'll just say that I thought that the conclusion of the plot was very clumsy and didn't seem to make sense when considered in tandem with the film. At one point the conclusion of the original film's plot is running side by side with the play so it is vital that the two plots do mesh together well. Sadly this was not the case! Despite this, Wicked is one of the best musicals I have ever seen!

I strongly recommend anyone and everyone to see this production! The musical talent is remarkable, the costumes look like something straight from a Jean-Paul Gaultier catwalk and the set is seemingly steampunk-inspired; a new look for a set but one that works really well in the context of the show.

The ensemble, despite pumping out so many performances a week for such a long time now, seems as fresh as a daisy and it genuinely feels like your performance might well have been the opening night! There is certainly no sense that anyone is getting stale, bored or complacent and Elphaba (Wicked Witch) played by Emma Hatton is amazing. That girl has a set of pipes!

I also adored the ditsy blonde Glinda the Good Witch played by Savannah Stephenson. And Oliver Savile looks very good in a tight pair of pants! Although I was expecting them to split embarrassingly revealing a pair of red polka dot pants at any point in his leaping around... The university where all of the core characters met was like a Hogwarts version of Oxbridge which was also very amusing! Definitely one to watch on a jaunt to London!

To Go or Not To Go? Hamlet at the RSC - Spring Summer 2016

Simon Godwin's production is certainly colourful and at times exuberant, but sadly a lot of it falls very flat. This might be because The National Theatre's startling production starring Benedict Cumberbatch is still so fresh in my mind from last year. Papa Essiedu's Hamlet is performed well and there are certainly moments of humour in his performance and I'm looking forward to seeing him in more, but what really troubled me was Ophelia. I'm so bored of seeing another presentation of a pathetically mentally inferior Ophelia. Why, oh why can't someone jump on the possibility of making her a strong, feminist character? Why in the 21st century with our obsession with adaptations has no one done an amazing world renown production focusing on Ophelia's story? Now that's what I'd go to see!

Natalie Simpson's Ophelia is poignant and tragic and tender, all the things that we expect Ophelia to be but there was nothing fresh in her characterisation. The only sense of innovation in this production was the relocation of the story to Africa. At times this really really worked, in the main when the Players arrived to perform at Elsinore but this shift could have been made much more of, particularly in the duel scene at the play's climax.

Why Godwin couldn't have put more twists like the romantic interest between Rosencrantz (James Cooney) and Guildenstern (Bethan Cullinane) I do not know. There is so much potential for excitement and variety with Hamlet and the RSC has the strength of cast, set, costume, you name it to wholly throw themselves at a new idea and run with it at 110 miles per hour to make it soar. I did love the sneaky students nearly getting caught by the King and Queen with their bong though! More of that please!

This is a production to see if you want a comfy, cosy adaptation of the classic story. Do not go expecting to leave reconsidering the themes of the play or Hamlet's plight. This play treads all too familiar ground, but admittedly it does do it rather well. Go for a fun night with friends, for a drink and chat, do not go to be dazzled by the genius of Shakespeare or the RSC.

Review of the RSC's Peter and Wendy

Playwright Ella Hickson's adaptation of J. M. Barrie's Peter Pan is much closer to the novel than the pantomimes, Hook starring Robin Williams and the other Hollywood/Disney films that have preceded it. There must have been many people in the audience who have never read the novel and whose sole experience of the story is from the Disney film - like partner Tom - as such they would have been surprised by  the restoration of the focus on to the novel's key themes of death and the death of childhood. Whilst this might have been a surprise, it would have been a very pleasant one! It is a fantastic production with a truly modern take on the classic children's story. It's also far more obviously feminist than the recent National Theatre production of Jane Eyre that I reviewed in my last blog. 

The, I hesitate to say, feminist approach to this production meant that the Darling's mother became a suffragette in response to the death of one of her sons and Wendy (Mariah Gale) loudly proclaimed the injustice of her being forced to grow up before her brothers. She loudly voiced how unfair it was that she was being encouraged into the stereotypical role of helpmeet and maternal guide from a very young age whilst her brothers carry on careering around playing soldiers. The reason that I hesitated to say 'feminist' was because really the play dances around the subject at times, however it does make concerted efforts to show the pressure of the conservative image of feminist on girls and women alike. The Darling's suffragette mother (Rebecca Johnson), for instance, discovered the political movement when she was grieving the death of her child as she found the inane chatter of polite ladies' society too much to bear afterwards.

The performances of the central cast are also remarkable. Peter Pan was played by a commendable actor, Rhys Rusbatch, whom I hope to see treading the boards of the RSC stage again soon. Hook (Darrell D'Silva) and Smee (Paul Kemp), it is suggested at times, have an hilarious homoerotic love affair! Tink is played as a feisty, voluptuous Brummie by Charlotte Mills adding moments of pathos and comedy throughout the performance. 

And the set ... Oh, the set... This is truly the masterpiece designs that make the RSC remarkable. Colin Richmond has really outdone himself with this visual, technological treat. I was at all times left speechless by the abilities of this set! 

I'm sad to see this production come to an end, but it is high praise to the RSC that the original production of Peter Pan in the Autumn/Winter 2013/14 period was so popular that it called for this second production this season. As such, it will be a long time before another adaptation of Barrie's beautiful, thought-provoking, coming of age story next appears in the theatre.  However, it would be great to see another classic children's story adapted for the RSC for the Autumn/Winter season this year or in 2017, who knows maybe we'll see a feminist Jungle Book maybe or Alice in Wonderland. 

Have a Very Feminist 2016!

Blog Review of The National Theatre's production of Jane Eyre directed by Sally Cookson 

I was so excited to finally see this reputedly fiery and apparently obviously feminist production! The nineteenth-century stage adaptations of Jane Eyre are the main subject of the first chapter of my thesis, so I was ready to get all up in Sally Cookson's grill in a nice, middle-class, purely academic way of course. But in all honesty, it wasn't as ragingly feminist as I was expecting it to have been. From reading the reviews in the papers I was expecting to be hit in the face with Germaine Greer's The Female Eunuch, and whilst there wasn't as much fire as I was expecting, that isn't to say that this isn't a feminist production of Jane Eyre.

Obviously, the germinal feminist elements of the original novel remain in Cookson's production and the minimalist, bare set with its carpenter's workshop-esque set highlight them by allowing plenty of visual room. It is a brilliantly effective construction designed by Michael Vale. The play opens with Jane Eyre coming into the world breathing her first breath and crying out for her parents. Whilst this happens one by one her parents and then her uncle die leaving her with her cold, uncaring and jealous aunt.

Sally Cookson has commented on her approach that any telling of Jane's story should begin with Jane's childhood and in the case of Jane Eyre this works well with the plot as it's often called a Bildungsroman. This is the German for a story which charts the maturation and moral and psychological growth of a character. Charlotte Bronte's Jane, like Cookson's, spends her life fighting her voice and the right to live her own life on her own terms.

The production started as a two-parter over two consecutive evenings at the Bristol Old Vic in 2014 and due to its success the National Theatre approached the company about bringing the play to London. The success continued in London as the reviews have shown and this is due to the strength of the cast. Bertha Mason (played by Melanie Marshall) has an amazingly rich mezzo voice that soars through the performance intensifying the high emotion. She is present throughout the production as a magnificent crimson-silk clad premonition.

Jane played by Madeleine Worrall is impressively rounded capturing Jane's appearance as a timid mouse-like delicate bird woman as well as her very vocal  desire for equality and love. Felix Hayes as Rochester is domineering, aggressive, brusque and powerful. Particularly in the scene after Jane has found out about Bertha's existence when she is telling Rochester that she has to leave, Hayes manages to reach a great surge of violence. Critics have viewed this scene as an attempted rape as Rochester physically restrains Jane preventing her from leaving Thornfield. This frenzy of emotion isn't managed to this level which is unfortunate as it would have intensified the feminist approach to this classic photo-feminist novel. However this is an example of the way, for me, that Cookson's Jane Eyre could have gone further in their 'feminist production'.

This is definitely a production with plenty of mileage and the run is just too short! More people should be given the chance to see this extremely thought-provoking production! And what's more, it's a great way to see in 2016!

May your 2016 be one of equality and love!

Lyndsey Turner's Hamlet at The Barbican starring 

Benedict Cumberbatch

My earliest memory is being at the theatre. I remember being captivated by swirling fabric rippling pink, orange and sunset red twisting through the seemingly magic space of the proscenium arch. This was a production of The Mikado at my local theatre, The Everyman in Cheltenham when I was just past two years old. My mother recounts to people to this day how I sat on her lap enthralled at what was happening. She had complained to my father about how inappropriate it was to take a toddler to the theatre but was astounded by my fascination with the stage. Since then I have endeavoured to see as many plays and productions of all sorts; professional and otherwise, as possible. To this day, theatre is my passion.

The NT Live screening I watched on Thursday night  is one of the reasons I love the theatre. This is an impressive production and an interesting adaptation. Of course there was a massive amount of attention directed at Turner's production because of stellar star Benedict Cumberbatch's appearance as Hamlet and unlike The Guardian's reviewer Michael Billington I didn't find the play an anti-climax after the hype (http://www.theguardian.com/stage/2015/aug/25/hamlet-barbican-review-benedict-cumberbatch-imprisoned-prince). Whereas Billington thought that there was too much focus on special effects over textual investigation, I think that the 'visual conceits' highlighted the cast and crew's textual investigation.

This is particularly evident in the final fight scene between Laertes and Hamlet with its explosion of light at the crucial moment and another example of their use of 'slow-mo' very physical acting, which punctuated the performance. The acting really was quite brilliant and while there was concern that Cumberbatch would steal the show, this was not the case as Hamlet's mother played by Anastasia Hille was touchingly maternal whilst yet shown to have been easily manipulated by Ciaran Hinds' Claudius, her new husband and deceased first husband's brother. Hinds' performance is strong and powerful as Hamlet and Hinds' Claudius regularly butt heads. Hinds' Claudius even clearly manipulates Rosencrantz and Gildernstern and is a truly formidable opponent for Hamlet. Ophelia played by Sian Brooke is truly disturbing but not altogether convincing. The role of Ophelia is a gift for an actress as it offers such an opportunity for emotional creativity and artistic licence. Her portrayal of a mental breakdown was moving but it did not feel real and so it rather fell flat. The rest of the supporting cast are strong performers, particularly the Ghost (Karl Johnson).

I was surprised to see the infamous 'To be or not to be' soliloquy moved from the opening as was the case the first night of the premiere. The 'To be or not to be' scene is infamous for wandering. The Second Quarto of 1604 is the closest to the  one we use today and in this edition the scene is moved to Act Three Scene One from Act Two immediately after Polonius has set up the 'accidental' meeting between Hamlet and Ophelia to test his theory to Claudius and Gertrude that Hamlet's madness was a result of his love for Ophelia. Having this transient scene move to the opening for the premiere was to get 'it' out of the way so that the audience could get past their excitement regarding Cumberbatch's appearance and then the rest of the play could commence but the backlash saw it quickly move back to its 'original' setting of Act Three Scene One (http://www.telegraph.co.uk/theatre/what-to-see/hamlet-solioquy-moved-back-after-backlash/).

I loved seeing this change, it's part of the joy going to see a production of any Shakeaspeare play for me. I love the omissions, alterations, insertions of invented characters or scenes. Shakespeare is the writer with whom the most artistic licence is possible because there are no lasting manuscripts that we know of written by him and because of the number of versions of the same play, such as Hamlet, which has a First Quarto (1603), Second Quarto (1604) and First Folio (1623). As such the joy of Shalespeare lies in its possibilities and Lyndsey Turner does everything possible with her Hamlet, flooding the stage with a hurricane of leaves, having Hamlet fire shits at the court from a toy fortress dressed up a soldier, the grim fairylike military palatial stronghold that they live in, Karl Johnson's comic, extremely uncouth gravedigger and the visualised corruption taking over the court in the second half with soil filling the rooms and corridors.

Turner's production with all its hype and expectation is as impressive as it was expected to be and the buzz will continue with NT Live encore screenings starting on 22nd October and the run ending on October 31st. If you haven't seen it already them definitely join in with the positively festive atmosphere at your local cinema where 5 year olds and 95 year olds alike sit with mouths agape captivated at the screen.

Votes for Women!

Blog Review of Sarah Gavron’s Suffragette

There are so many ‘feminist’ films and they all look at a wide range of women’s experiences, from motherhood, marriage, careers, sisterhood and also coming of age. Very few, however,  have charted the history of women’s struggle to obtain the right to vote, especially the events preceding the outbreak of the First World War. Emily Wilding Davison’s arguably heroic or insane act of throwing herself at the King’s horse during the race on Derby Day in June 1913 has been the subject of many documentaries, most recently by Claire Baldwin for Channel 4. But in Sarah Gavron's Suffragette it is central to the story and is shown through the eyes of poor, manipulated, working-class Maud Watts from London. It is her realisation of the importance of the right to vote and what that meant to women of all classes that is the heartbeat of the film. Gavron said that she had wanted to show the unsung working class heroes who had campaigned for the right to vote as the attention has usually been on the aristocratic or middle- to upper-class women in previous films. These working class women’s rights pioneers had so much more to lose than their more affluent counterparts. They already struggled to earn enough money to scrape by, with hard times and the possibility of starvation or living on the streets a very real, very near possibility. So to take on an additional risk that pushed those possibilities even closer to fruition shows how much they cared for and understood the significance of what they were asking for. Women who were publicly known to support the cause and be involved in the public demonstrations were shunned by society and even lost their jobs. The jobs that just about kept a leaky roof over their head and a stale crust of bread in the kitchen.

Maud (Carey Mulligan) experiences these eventualities but does not admit defeat. Her husband (Ben Whishaw) seemingly caring at first, has no sympathy or understanding of why women need the vote and turns out to be very impressionable to other people’s opinions. As such, he is the one who really breaks Maud’s heart. The relationships between men and women are not as often featured in the film as the relationships between women for obvious reasons, but when they are shown they are presented as relationships of heavy disparity between their positions in society both legally and physically. This highlights the real reason behind women's desire for the right to vote. It didn't just give them the right to expression and a right to have a say in electing political leaders, it meant that it would have been legally recognised that women had a different opinion and a voice entirely different to the men surrounding them. As such, it would also have meant that they were entirely separate beings from the men that they lived with and who controlled their lives. It was only in 1870 that the Married Women's Property Act ended the previously existing condition that on marriage any property, money, or more widely anything owned by a woman, earned or inherited, before or after the marriage became the husband's to dispose of, sell, keep as he saw fit. This included children; the father could do with them as he saw fit including preventing any access to the children from the mother.

Women's rights were slowly increasing through the nineteenth-century due to campaigners like Caroline Norton  and Josephine Butler  and so by 1912 the fact that women still did not have the vote despite over a hundred years of attention being brought to the fact that women were equal in every way really rankled. The Suffragists had been the first party to form and start raising public awareness to the issue but they used just their voices and their pens, dissatisfaction at the pace that this seemingly 'got things done' led to the break off movement of the Suffragettes. They were a more militant group who felt that enough talking had been done and that it was time to take action. They argued that because men were the ones who had been stereotypically seen as the gender capable of violence, that men would only respond to violent acts. They set about smashing windows, blowing up letter boxes and even bombing MPs homes. These are all documented in the film but what the film does not say is that these acts actually slowed down the process of passing the bill giving women the right to vote. For the men in power it was another reason to be used to argue that women were not capable of voting, they were too emotional, too hasty, too reckless, they needed men to control them. It was only in 1928 that women finally had the same voting rights as men despite the fact that in 1911 and 1912 there were many men in parliament who were actively supporting the women's movement. Interestingly Winston Churchill, Britain's hero, was not one of that number. He famously said

The women's suffrage movement is only the small edge of the wedge, if we allow women to vote it will mean the loss of social structure and the rise of every liberal cause under the sun. Women are well represented by fathers, brothers, and husbands.


This attitude is the one carried through the film (the quotation is even delivered at one point early on) and it is this belief that the women are trying to desperately overturn with their increasingly extreme actions.

The film features a truly star studded cast including Meryl Streep, Brendan Gleeson, Carey Mulligan, Helena Bonham Carter, Ben Whishaw and Romola Garai. It is superbly performed and poignantly written. It is. It's definitely the film to watch this autumn. It is also a must watch for everyone being categorically universal and extremely relevant due to many of the themes being as relevant today as they were in the 1910s. Such as:



1. Due to the gap in pay, women essentially work for free for 57 days a year  http://www.independent.co.uk/news/uk/equal-pay-day-women-now-working-for-free-for-the-rest-of-the-year-9837965.html
2. UKIP have been connected with proclaiming  wide range of anti-feminist messages. Here's a link to just a snapshot of some of their statements:  http://leftfootforward.org/2014/05/15-reasons-women-shouldnt-vote-for-ukip/
3. Malala Yousafzai is drawing attention to women's rights to the same level of education as men in Pakistan
4. In the UK, the Home Office has estimated that there are 170,000 girls and women who are survivors of the practice and that there are another 65,000 girls under the age of 13 still at risk
5. 77% of Britain's MPs are men - nuff said!
6. 80% of university professors are men (http://www.huffingtonpost.co.uk/2015/07/15/gender-inequality-uk-women-feminism-young-foundation_n_7800388.html)
7. 80% of women are still doing more housework than their partners, invariably on top of working and childcare  (http://www.newstatesman.com/v-spot/2013/05/five-main-issues-facing-modern-feminism)
8. 89% of the accounts of domestic violence have female victims (http://www.newstatesman.com/v-spot/2013/05/five-main-issues-facing-modern-feminism)
9. Tim Hunt's outrageous comment regarding women in the lab (http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/blogs-trending-33099289)
10. Women are more likely to be victims of trolling   (http://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2015/apr/15/dealing-with-trolls-make-young-women-sympathetic-hillary)

BBC's Lady Chatterley’s Lover review: A Lacklustre Reimagining of Lust and Love Across the Edwardian Classes

Mellors (Richard Madden) and Lady Chatterley (Holliday Grainger)

Jed Mercurio’s adaptation is so loose that it's really just a reimagining of D.H. Lawrence’s passionate, heated, earthy love story.  Mercurio has missed the mark on hitting the right fever pitch of emotion on so many occasions in this adaptation. The chemistry and fraught sexual tension between Lady Chatterley and Mellors just isn't achieved. The love story is certainly there but it simply doesn't capture the bestial nature of Lawrence’s presentation of their class defying relationship.

One of the real reasons for the book’s ban was the public’s disgust at Lady Chatterley’s relationship with the groundskeeper Mellors. It was considered to be extremely shocking for an aristocratic lady to be sexual attracted to and fall in love with a very lowly member of the working classes at that time. For over a hundred years the espoused images of femininity did not include having any sexual energy. It was commonly accepted that women did not experience sexual desire by doctors all over the world. Women who did experience this desire during the Victorian period could be diagnosed as mad and many unfortunate women were ‘treated’ for this disorder by having a clitirodectomy (surgical removal of the clitoris). The Edwardian period (the book was published in 1928 but is sent in the last years of the Edwardian era) was just beginning to move away from this belief but the strict class and racial barriers remained firmly in place, therefore it was permissible for a woman to experience desire but that would only  be for her husband, i.e., her social equal. Lust, or love, over the class barriers was considered perverse and was a transgression of the accepted hierarchy that kept the status quo of British middle- and upper-class power in place. It threatened the core of society and terrified the upper echelons. The Obscenity Ban on the book was really nothing to do with the florid language used by Lawrence. As such, that Mercurio fails to convey this integral theme is a massive failing in his retelling of the novel. It is the theme that the whole novel hinges on.

The issue with adapting a novel, or any story, is how to make it relevant to the audience today. Admittedly you could argue that Britain no longer permeates the same bizarre notions of female sexlessness, so retaining this theme would be meaningless for a contemporary audience but the lack of class mobility in this country still remains; Britain has the lowest social mobility in the developed world

(http://www.theguardian.com/news/datablog/2012/may/22/social-mobility-data-charts). Anyone watching this adaptation, or reading the original novel, today would be able to relate to this feeling of entrapment.

The approach to the story that Mercurio has taken instead is to focus on the backstory of the characters. This worked well, making all of the characters relatable, especially Sir Clifford Chatterley (James Norton) whose struggles to come to terms with his disability are so poignant that they hit the very heart of the viewer. With the insertion of the invented scenes such as the opening with the explosion in the coal mine and the trench scene where we learn that in Mercurio’s adaptation, Mellors not only saves Sir Clifford’s life and also leads the charge over to the top into No Man’s Land that Sir Clifford should have done had he not been shot.

Mellors (Richard Madden) and Lady Chatterley (Holliday Grainger) are amiably performed but as I said the lustful magic just isn't there. The love story between them is evident, enforced by the adaptation’s conclusion where they waltz off into the sunset with each other after negotiating an agreement to divorce out of Sir Clifford. This dramatically opposes the ending of the original story. Mellors is still married to his wife Bertha (remember that woman who was flashing her naked bosom up against the window when Mellors returned from war at the beginning of the drama? Well, that was her!). He has to have his divorce from her granted so goes alone to work on a farm whilst he waits and Lady Chatterley goes to live with her sister until her divorce from Clifford is granted. Ultimately the novel ends on a massive cliffhanger, suggesting that while both of these “star-cross’d lovers” have the desire to oppose the accepted class barriers by being together, the system is too strong to break. There is hope, but it is very uncertain.

There are other crucial changes that Mercurio makes but they don't impact too much on the transplanting of the essence of the original story. The omission of some of the more marginal, but nonetheless important, characters, like Bertha Mellors is the most dramatic change but the trouble she wreaks in the novel is carried out by the Chatterley’s servant, Bolton instead.

Overall, it was a great night’s viewing but it's not a great adaptation. Mercurio does however show how much flexibility there is with adaptation as a genre. It's just a pity that he was so close to creating an extraordinary adaptation. It could have been up there with the likes of Andrew Davies’ 1995 Pride and Prejudice. In fact, I think a good adaptation of Lady Chatterley’s Lover could become even more of a cultural phenomenon than Davies’ Pride and Prejudice because Lawrence is writing is so much more intimate, personal and emotive than Austen’s.

An interview with Justin Audibert- The Jew of Malta at the RSC

An interview with Justin Audibert

After being delighted and intrigued by Justin Audibert’s production of Marlowe’s The Jew if Malta (see my blog review of the production here http://amyeholley.blogspot.co.uk/2015/07/review-of-rscs-jew-of-malta-this-is.html), I emailed the director Justin Audibert to ask some questions about his approach to this now problematic, even contentious show.

Here’s my emailed interview! And a big thanks to Justin Audibert again!

In terms of The Jew, what was your overarching directorial approach?

I wanted to keep the show as pacy as possible so that as events escalate the audience almost feel overwhelmed with the Marlovian mayhem.

And, in terms of your interpretation of Barabas' motivations what message(s) did you and Jasper Britton want to convey? 

It was very important to us that we make it clear that Barabas is wronged in the first place. I don't think either of us would argue that Barabas is a 'good' man but at the same time he is a highly capable survivor who is living in a fundamentally prejudiced and hypocritical society. Jasper is probably one of the most charming actors working today and it was delightful watching him make the audience complicit in all of Barabas' deeds.

I loved the companionship between Ithamore and Barabas and felt that it came over as a very close relationship, way above the kind of relationship that I've seen in other productions (their approach to Ithamore was that he was just doing what he was told whilst he waited for the perfect opportunity to escape his slavery and overthrow his master). The role of master and slave in your production seems minimal and instead there's a real emphasis on their similar social positions as marginalised, hated characters acting as an equalising bridge to open up a space for friendship. I was wondering if that was intentional, as I LOVED it! It felt very fresh. 

Yes it was intentional. We felt that Barabas sees in Ithamore a fellow victim of oppression. And he rescues him from a further beating from the guards, which also gives Ithamore further cause to hate the Christians. It also felt right that they should both delight in their villainy - there revenge is a dish best served boiling hot!

I was also wondering about your career in general, do you have a favourite playwright or a period from which to direct? 

Elizabethan and Jacobean work has such richness of language and imagery and such high stakes (heaven, hell, power, sex, etc) that it is difficult to top- plus I love the way comedy and tragedy sit side by side which is basically what I think happens in life.

Do you think that you have a directorial style? If so, what would you say it was?

I don't think I have a style really. I try and suit my thinking about the play to the specific needs of the text.

Is there a play you would love to direct given the opportunity? 

T'is Pity She's a Whore would be fun... So would The Changeling... and I hope when I am much older to get a crack at Lear...

And finally, I was wondering about your career path, how did you get into directing? I can see you're freelance and that you're also an Artistic Associate for a couple of companies and an Education Associate Practitioner for the RSC too! Did you study it at uni or did you find your own path? 

I studied History and Politics at Sheffield Uni but spent all of my time in the theatre there putting shows on with suTCO (Sheffield University Theatre Company). I then was a teacher for a couple of years and then I did the MFA in Theatre Directing at Birkbeck which was a brilliant course and really has stood me in good stead. I enjoy being a freelancer immensely and working with Young People and Community Groups is as fulfilling for me as working with professional actors.

As I'm off sick this week with an ear infection, also affecting my throat (!), this week's blog is the paper I delivered at the weekend for Sensational Influences: Mary Elizabeth Braddon’s Literary Legacy - 4-5 September 2015. Once I've recovered the blogs will go back go the usual adaptation reviews! The next one is the BBC's latest adaptation of Lady Chatterley's Lover! So keep your eyes peeled for some sauciness after the last two weeks of academic dryness!

Mad, Bad or Pretending? Analysing the Theatrical Approach to Lady Audley in Nineteenth-Century Stage Adaptations of Braddon’s Lady Audley’s Secret

Whilst I've been listening to the papers today, I’ve also been noting all of the different words we use to describe Lady Audley:

Innocent
Girlbride
Villain
Pretty
Mad
Blonde
Childlike
Femme fatale
Actress

As you can see, she's a lot of things to people. This was also the case for the Victorians. So can she be just one of these things?  We’ve tended towards calling her bad, or a villain, today, but I argue that the uncertainty around deciding if she is bad or mad, or even if she is something other, for example, consciously acting mad,  was a deliberate decision made by Braddon in order to provoke a sensational response from the reader. This is why the authenticity of her madness remains as much of an issue today as when it was first published. But by studying the nineteenth-century adaptations of Lady Audley’s Secret we can identify how she was interpreted at the time by specific factions of society, not just by critics, other writers, royalty or other notable contemporary figures, but by real people. We’ll ultimately never be able to decide whether she is mad, or bad, or acting mad, but I think that that is the real secret of Lady Audley’s Secret, it’s nothing to do with her true identity.

The nineteenth-century adaptations present Lady Audley as either a transgressive woman, who was forced into making a bad decision about how to support herself after her husband abandoned her, as in William E. Suter’s 1863 and John Brougham’s 1866 adaptations. Whilst the others simply dismiss her as a madwoman, for example, George Roberts’ 1863 and C.H. Hazlewood’s 1863 plays.

My PhD thesis focuses on an examination of the Victorian approaches to some of the most contentious figures in nineteenth-century literature when they were adapted to the stage. The plays I examine in the Lady Audley’s Secret chapter of  my thesis are William E. Suter’s Lady Audley’s Secret (1863), George Roberts’ Lady Audley’s Secret (1863), C. H. Hazlewood’s Lady Audley’s Secret and Brougham’s 1866 play The Mystery of Audley Court. Whilst they are all London based adaptations, they were written for and appeared in a range of theatres across the city as such they do cover a wide spectrum of society. The theatres that the plays were written for appealed to different social classes to make up their audiences and as such different approaches to the complex central character, Lady Audley, can be recognised.

I need to explain a crucial term before my comparison of the plays begins to provide some context of nineteenth-century theatre. All of the plays discussed here are examples of theatrical melodrama. The literal translation of melodrama is ‘music drama’. Music was played during performances of plays in this genre and this has a direct impact on the manner in which the actors performed. Patsy Stoneman in Jane Eyre on Stage; 1848-1898 refers to both Taylor and Booth, who have suggested that this “inevitably led to a heightened, deliberate and passionate mode of delivery’, with many pauses to allow the words to carry; actors emphasised their words by facial and bodily gestures (Stoneman 2007: 6 citing Taylor 1989: 125 – 129 and Booth (a) 1964: 31-36). Melodrama was the dominant theatrical form in the nineteenth-century (John 2009: 1). Melodrama arose from The Theatre Regulating Acts as prior to 1843, there were only two ‘legal’ theatres in England, The Covent Garden and Drury Lane. These theatres were the only ones that were licensed to produce ‘legitimate’ drama, therefore, the ‘minor’ theatres, such as the New Surrey Theatre and the Adelphi Theatre, had to adapt the manner in which they produced plays in order to meet the public’s demand for entertainment in order to  evade the law.  This meant that theatre houses had to use music as an accompaniment to their productions as the legitimate theatres were the only ones permitted to produce spoken drama.

I'm looking at one key scene in all of the plays to demonstrate my point today given the time limit. The scene examined in the adaptations is where Lady Audley is reunited with her husband George Talboys, who believes her to be dead when she has actually assumed a false identity and married again. Interestingly this scene is only described by other characters in the novel and does not actually feature, whereas it us a key scene in the plays. The reasons for the omission of the scene in the original source but the invention of and insertion of it into the plays are multiple so I do not have time to discuss that here today.

William E. Suter’s play is the first adaptation to appear that we know of from the Lord Chamberlain’s archives. It is also the most famous due to the high profile court case surrounding it, which arose because the play was published in paperback by Thomas Lacy at a time when it was illegal to do so because of the copyright laws of the age. A dramatist could only adapt and produce a novel without permission or payment, they could not print it. In order to have rights over a play adaptation of their novel, the author must have written, staged and registered the play before anyone else. Mary Elizabeth Braddon went on to do this herself years later when she wrote Like and Unlike in 1887.

William Edmund Souter was an actor and playwright appearing largely at Sadler’s Wells in London. He was a successful playwright most known for writing melodramas and comedies for minor theatres in London. His success was such that his plays continued to be performed in provincial theatres for decades. The Queen’s Theatre, London was where this production of Lady Audley’s Secret was staged. It was the only theatre in the borough of St. Pancras. In its early days, the theatre did not attract a very illustrious audience, members mainly coming from the skilled working class trades, for example, shoemakers, carpenters, tailors, bricklayers, etc. and the popular occupations for women being domestic servants, cooks, charwomen, milliners, seamstresses, etc. (Davis and Emeljanow 2005: 149). This is evident in the play’s shared focus between the invented servant characters and Lady Audley and Robert Audley. It even opens with comedic business between the servant characters Bibbles and Bubbles. These characters occupy the sub-plot of Suter’s play and interject the novel’s original plot at various points for comedic effect. As such the play is highly melodramatic. This might explain why Suter’s approach to Lady Audley is that she is a bad woman. One reviewer from The Era described Adelaide Calvert “playing”  Lady Audley “with a thrilling intensity” (The Era, Sunday 14 June 1863: p12). At all times there is a high level of emotion in Suter’s play and this is particularly the case in the key scene I will look at today.

LADY A: Listen to me. After your departure, I vainly sought employment – a wife whom her husband had deserted could not be innocent of all fault – and no one would receive me as the instructress of their children. I was penniless – helpless – hopeless; before me was starvation or a repulsive life of infamy! I shrunk from both and resolved to live anew, and for myself alone. I ceased to be Mrs. George Talboys, forgot even that I had ever been Helen Maldon, and became Miss Lucy Graham... I became Sir Michael’s wife... (Suter 1863: 34)

The line “a wife whom her husband had deserted could not be innocent of all fault” reveals how strict the Victorian image of femininity could be as it indicates the mode of thinking that even abandoned wives were suspected of committing actions that has driven him away. Today that can be hard to swallow. We look at Lady Audley with pity, knowing that George abandoned her and their child, left her with little money or anything of worth whilst knowing her to be incapable of earning a decent living, and yet she is the one saddled with the blame, with aspersions cast on her character and none on George’s.

No one condemns George for leaving his wife and child as he recounts his tale in either the novel or the adapted plays, so in this section Lady Audley raises the hypocrisy of this double standard. Deciding if Lady Audley is mad can be answered with the line “I shrunk from both and resolved to live anew, and for myself alone” (Suter 1863: 34) which indicates that thought and calculation went into her assumption of a false identity. As with Braddon’s portrayal of Lady Audley’s assumed life, it was not the act of a lunatic. It was the illegal act of a trapped woman left with few options to support herself.

Because the play was written for a poor working class audience it is no wonder that Suter shows Lady Audley to be a trapped woman who simply does what she can to earn a living to support herself and her child not knowing when, or even if, her husband would return. Steven Marcus in The Other Victorians reveals that prostitution was a flexible occupation in the Victorian period with women turning to it as and when they needed to find extra money to support themselves and their children (Marcus 1964: 6). As such the audience of The Queen’s Theatre in London would no doubt have had housed former and current prostitutes, who would have a very different notion on what was acceptable to do to support your family than the more middle-class theatre houses.

John Brougham’s approach to this scene in his 1866’s production for Astley’s Theatre, also supports that Lady Audley acted in a calculated manner when she assumed her false identity and ran away leaving her child with her  father:

Lady A: You left not letter, but fled like a dastard, leaving me penniless, friendless, - hopeless! – The abandoned wife finds little pity from the charitable world, in vain I sought for employment, - there was nothing before me but starvation, or a life of infamy. – I shrunk from both, determined to blot out the past for ever, and under a new name began the world again as Lucy Graham. – I went into a family as Governess, and toiled there for a miserable stipend; Sir Michael Audley saw, admired and married me, you now know everything; and to all this, let me add that I will never give up the wealth and splendour I have obtained; therefore, if you are wise you will forget me and go!- (Brougham 1866: 61 - 62)

Again, the image of the abandoned wife is conjured showing the pity that Brougham was attempting to evoke for this transgressive woman forced to make bad decisions by a restrictive patriarchal society. It also reveals that for Brougham, Lady Audley had thoroughly considered her options before taking on her new name and starting her new life. John Brougham’s poignant depiction of a transgressive Lady Audley may be a consequence of his own background and opinions as the theatre that this was written for used to attract a respectable middle class audience who you’d expect to find a mad Lady Audley depicted for as I shall explain later. Brougham was a very popular and successful playwright specialising in adaptations. I examine his 1848 adaptation of Jane Eyre in Chapter One of my thesis. Brougham was originally from a wealthy Irish family in Dublin but due to a series of family deaths he was left destitute and impoverished, when he had originally planned to become a surgeon. He turned to acting as a means of supporting himself and later due to his success, he moved to America. As Brougham had, like Lady Audley, been forced to seek any means to make money he might well have sympathised with her plight. He might also have been able to sympathise with Lady Audley’s battle against a prejudiced society, as during this period there were some anti-Irish movements due to the huge waves of migrants arriving in England fleeing Ireland because of the Great Famine of 1845 to 1852. This criminal, woman pushed to the edge version of Lady Audley as presented by Brougham and Suter, is contrasted with the dismissive approach that she was just mad and therefore her actions should be regarded as such. Both George Roberts 1863 and C.H. Hazlewood 1863 take this approach to the character.

George Roberts actually worked with Braddon on the creation of this production. As Braddon had publicly complained about the large number of unauthorised stage versions of her novel which were appearing, Roberts was very keen to gain her approval and therefore invited Braddon to the rehearsals. Braddon responded to Roberts’ invitation saying that she was “flattered and gratified” and that she “would not for a moment dream of offering any suggestions” (Robert Lee Wolff, Sensational Victorian: The Life and Fiction of Mary Elizabeth Braddon (New York and London: Garland, 1979: p143) cited in Roberts (1863: 8). George Roberts was born Robert Walters in 1832 in London, the son of a barrister. He followed into the family profession and worked as a barrister in Oxfordshire before moving to London to pursue his career as a playwright. He pursued his second career whilst living in chambers with five other barristers (cited in Roberts 1863: 5). This dramatisation of Braddon’s Lady Audley’s Secret was Roberts’ greatest success with productions continuing regularly in Britain throughout the century. In order to avoid a court case similar to that which Braddon experienced over the lack of appropriate copyrighting for her novel, Roberts protected his play by personally overseeing the printed edition of his work.

The play was under the management of Frank Matthews, who played Luke Marks in Roberts’ adaptation, when it opened on 28th February 1863. When the play opened, the novel was at the peak of its success. Jennifer Carnell describes it as “the current hit of the circulating libraries” in her introduction to George Roberts’ play (Roberts 1863: 6). Lady Audley’s Secret was the St. James’ Theatre’s biggest hit to date, running for over one hundred performances before starting a tour of the country. Ian Henderson cites a review in the Illustrated London News which describes Lady Audley as “prompted to crime by hereditary insanity and untoward circumstances, and therefore impelled by both external and internal motives” (2006: 15). In the key scene that we are examining today,  where she is reunited with George Talboys, she details the trials and tribulations that led her to assume a false identity and marry bigamously conjuring enormous sympathy from the audience:

LADY A: Wrong! have not you wronged me? You prate to me of toil and suffering. You do not know the labour that has been my lot for many a weary day. What was my life when you were gone? No helping hand held out to me by your proud family; I, your wife, left to choose ‘twixt death and drudgery. I chose the latter, bitter though that choice was... I argued, I reasoned, and last I justified myself. I have a right to think that he is no more to me, nor I to him, and why should I let his shadow stand between me and prosperity? (Roberts 1863: 39-40).

This makes her sound like a very rational woman especially with her comments that she ‘argued’, ‘reasoned’ and ‘justified’ the decision, but nineteenth-century medical studies of madness, identified ‘moral madness’ as a specific type of insanity. This was a concept introduced by James Cowles Pritchard in 1835 in Treatise on insanity and other disorders affecting the mind to describe a particular kind of mental disorder where the madness consisted of “a morbid perversion of the natural feelings, affections, inclinations, temper, habits, (and importantly for Lady Audley) moral dispositions, and natural impulses, without any remarkable disorder or defect of the interest or knowing and reasoning faculties, and particularly without any insane illusion or hallucinations” (1837: 16). If Lady Audley did suffer from moral insanity was she then not culpable for her crimes? Moreover, was moral insanity the excuse used by nineteenth-century society to refer to the criminal behaviour that was actually just unpalatable for them? Lady Audley’s reasoning of her bad decisions for the Victorians was a symptom of her madness. As the play goes on, Roberts’ characterisation of becomes progressively and more obviously unhinged.  Roberts’ final scene indicates his overall interpretation to Lady Audley’s ‘madness’, as she collapses into a trance-like state because of the mental strain with Robert Audley saying over her that “the soul still lingers, but the mind, the mind is gone! CURTAIN” (Roberts 1863: 63-64).

The impact of the area and the class composition of the audience who would have lived in the surrounding area of the theatre, on Roberts’ approach to Lady Audley is interesting because the theatre was said to be respectable and to attract a more middle-class audiences. As such by  making Lady Audley mad, he aligns himself with the traditional, conservative, patriarchal view of women as weak and degenerate. Mental illness was considered to be a female condition with women being more susceptible to it.

In Hazlewood’s play, Lady Audley goes into even more detail describing the situation that George Talboys left her and their newborn baby in when he abandoned them. She explains how believing herself to have been deserted she changed her name and became a governess:


LADY Audley. ... not one letter reached my hands; I thought myself deserted, and determined to make reprisals on you; I changed my name; I entered the family of a gentleman as governess to his daughters; became the patient drudge for a miserable stipend, that I might carry my point--that point was to gain Sir Michael Audley's affections; I did so, I devoted all my energies, all my cunning, to that end! and now I have gained the summit of my ambition, do you think I will be cast down by you, George Talboys? No, I will conquer you or I will die! ... I have fought too hard for my position to yield it up tamely. Take every jewel, every penny I have and leave me! ... I am no longer the weak confiding girl you first knew me no, I am a resolute woman--and where I cannot remove an obstacle I will crush it (Hazlewood 1863: Act 1: Scene 1 no page numbers).


This Lady Audley is trapped, frightened, and emotional. The scene reaches such a tense pitch that she even tries to bribe the now equally rich George reminding him pointlessly of her newly obtained wealth. It is only when her bribe fails that she realises that she will have to get rid of George another way and they fight before she eventually pushes him down the well after stabbing him:

It is indeed--die! [Pushes him down the well, the ruined stones fall with him.] He is gone--gone! and no one was a witness to the deed! ... [exulting]. Dead men tell no tales! I am free! I am free! I am free!--Ha, ha, ha! [Raises her arms in triumph, laughing exultingly falls (Hazlewood 1863: Act One: Scene One no page numbers).

The stage directions here so obviously cast Lady Audley as mad here by describing her as exulting, triumphant, hands raised in the air. The climax scene of Hazlewood’s adaptation, shows Lady Audley entirely succumbing to madness

Robert. Do you not see she is mad?
Omnes [retreating from her]. mad!
LADY Audley. Aye--aye! [Laughs wildly.] mad, mad, that is the word. I feel it here--here! [Places her hands on her temples.] Do not touch me do not come near me--let me claim your silence--your pity--and let the grave, the cold grave, close over Lady Audley and her Secret.
[Falls--dies--Music tableau of sympathy--GEORGE
TALBOYS kneels over her. CURTAIN (Hazlewood 1863: Act II: Scene Five no page numbers)

Here Lady Audley has a moment of psychosis seeing the, by then, deceased Sir Michael in front of her before she eventually collapses and dies. When Robert tells everyone that she has gone ‘mad’, they ‘retreat’ from her as though her diagnosis was contagious, indicating the extent of the fear that Victorian society had of ‘madness’. The language is noticeably very melodramatic and tense, but the manner in which it was acted is not confirmed by any surviving reviews of the production or the actresses, sadly. The moment of mania or psychosis that is shown in this scene belongs to a different aspect of mental health that is more severe than hysteria, as is indicated in Andrew Scull’s Hysteria (2009: 35). As such, this implies that Hazlewood did genuinely consider Lady Audley to be certifiably mad. Delusions were a key element for the legal defense of insanity in the period as per the, still used, 1842 McNaughton rules. The reason for this approach to Lady Audley might be a consequence of the theatre for which he was writing as they thrived on extremely emotive, suspenseful, high pitched entertainment. This adaptation was first produced at the Royal Victoria Theatre, London on 25 May 1863. The Victoria Theatre was built in 1818 as a result of the dramatic expansion in the population of London in the eighteenth-century due to the Industrial Revolution, which was particularly felt south of the River Thames in the Southwark and Lambeth areas were the Victoria was located. As the areas expanded, the Victoria and the nearby Surrey Theatre became vital for providing entertainment to the people living in the area. The Victoria was dependent on the “patronage of a class unable to get far from the immediate scene of their daily labors” for its audience (Davis and Emeljanow 2005: 8). The audience was even described as “the lowest and vilest in London, the very scum of Lambeth” (H. Barton Baker, The London Stage: Its History and Traditions from 1576 to 1888 (London: Allen, 1889) cited in Davis and Emeljanow 2005: 9). The low working class audience of the Victoria Theatre received “Melodramas, Domestic Melodramas of 3 Acts, Burlettas, Comic Interludes, Pantomime” as their entertainment (Davis and Emeljanow 2005: 24).

In conclusion, while the dramatists differ on whether Lady Audley was mad, bad or  acting mad, they all agree that what became of her was as a consequence of the desperate position she had been forced into and from which she had few options to release herself. This is very important trope in Victorian literature. Look at Jane Eyre when the same struggles also result in a near mental collapse in the Red Room, or Lady Isabel Vane who disguises herself as a governess and moves back in with her husband and his new wife just to be able to see her children again.

Lady Audley as a lower-middle-class woman who marries a wealthy officer,  grew to expect a certain lifestyle which was suddenly not going to be provided for her anymore, and more than that, they did not know how they would survive. Her husband abandons her and her child and then, because of the unfairness of the marriage laws of the day, she was prevented from releasing herself from the husband who abandoned her and their child without further contact. Is this injustice enough to make her ‘mad’?

For Roberts and Hazlewood, it was. Lady Audley is ‘mad’. Whereas, for Suter and Brougham, Lady Audley is a bad woman or, more pertinently in Brougham’s case, a woman who made bad choices. In A Literature of their Own, Elaine Showalter states that the worry for many was that “Lady Audley’s real secret is that she is sane and, moreover, representative” (Showalter 1984: 167). This explains the more obviously mad stage versions of Lady Audley. By portraying Lady Audley as mad, her actions were dismissed as abnormal and then the traditional image of the good, ‘angel in the house’, middle-class woman could be permeated without further disturbance and other equally transgressive acts in life and literature could be dismissed as evidence of female mental weakness. As madness was considered to be a feminine illness, her behaviour was only deemed ‘mad’ because she was seen to be acting in what was considered to be a recognisably unfeminine manner.  She was meant to be a moral instructress to her children whilst her husband was allowed to occupy the world, existing in the public sphere surrounded by temptations but at the thought of his chaste, Christian wife waiting at home, he was able to conquer all temptations and return home to her to be saved over and over again. Lady Audley doesn't do this. She does not submit to peaceful poverty in her husband’s absence. Brougham highlights this hypocrisy in his conclusion  by having Lady Audley accuse everyone gathered around her for goading her to ‘madness’. But Suter, Roberts and Hazlewood all include the scene where Lady Audley explains to George Talboys that she assumed a false identity because of the impossible position she had been put in. And, therefore in all of the plays, Lady Audley’s actions, whether they are  rooted in madness or not, stems from the restrictions placed on her gender during the nineteenth-century. That she tried to escape those restrictions, made her ‘mad’ in the eyes of nineteenth-century society.