Rich Jevons talks to Northern Broadsides’ resident director and composer Conrad Nelson on She Stoops to Conquer, a farcical rom-com that tours extensively this autumn.
Firstly, could you tell us a bit about what the original Oliver Goldsmith play would have been like?
It was rebelling against sentimental comedy, this was a bit of a contrast and back to that ‘laughing comedy’ – it had more body to it, more bounce and vigour and belly laughs! So I imagine it was quite full in terms of style and presentation. The characters are large in this play anyway so I imagine it was a very colourful experience and reasonably raucous. There is satirical content in this, some of which we won’t get, but what we will get is a class thing and it touches on status and the London versus Provinces debate.
In the genre of Comedy of Manners how would it compare to Sheridan and Wilde?
We did School for Scandal and we’ve got the same person designing this and it’s got elements of sentimental comedy, it’s a rom-com. You have a central character who is a modern woman in this play and the mother is the enemy of the piece: she’s comedic, horrific, aspirational as she’s locked in this big mansion and unable to get to London, she’s avaricious as well, she’s a bit of a monster.
How has it been Broadsided?
Whereas this play is normally set in the West Country, obviously we’re not going to do that because it wouldn’t make any sense for us as a Northern company. So in this instance we’ve moved it to North Yorkshire though the specifics are not important apart from the parentage in this place. So our older class, Mr and Mrs Hardcastle, do come from Harrogate or somewhere like that and then our next generation down are Northern but they’re just flat-vowelled standard English and then our guys from London are R[eceived] P[ronunciation].
So somehow we’re trying to make a distinction between a generational thing and class. Normally in a play like this everybody except the country folk would be RP. But it’s a little bit more difficult because we have to make a distinction for our company.
Can you tell us a bit about the Hardcastles?
Hardcastle is landed gentry or at least new moneyed gentry and has wealth. Mrs Hardcastle has been married before and she has a son, Tony Lumpkin, from a previous marriage. What brings them two together if you do a back story is a marriage of convenience or money. But what’s for sure is that Goldsmith’s interested in the father-daughter relationship and the mother-son relationship . The play doesn’t really mingle the characters together.
Mrs Hardcastle looks for modernity, she longs for London but never goes there so all of her essence of London is got from a novel or a book so she’s not quite right. She’s not dressed quite rightly in our version – she’s got a large ginger wig she’s seen in a magazine. It feels like she’s locked in this big old manor house with lots of stuffed animals and horns and it feels like she’s standing at the window shooting at the local wildlife. Mr Hardcsastle is much more settled, he’s much more into old school, old ways, whereas she’s a little more Hyacinth Bouquet.
And how about Miss Kate?
She’s very modern and spiky and spunky, opinionated and controlling in a way, and liking a challenge. So she’s young and has all of those modern qualities and is able to hold her own. If it’s petulance it’s not an unattractive petulance, it’s an understandable vigour that she’s got. She’s warm and sensible and she’s got an ability to stand aside from herself.
And her suitor Young Marlow? What drives him?
He’s full of contradiction and incapable of chatting up or having a relationship with modest, well-to-do, well-bred women. He’s tongue-tied and gets terribly self-conscious, he’s just an utter wreck. Whereas when he’s in the company of barmaids or lower-class women he becomes rakish and predatory so he has two sides to him.
It’s subtitled ‘The Mistakes of A Night’ and it all takes place in one night – has that been a challenge?
The idea has always been to be faithful to that so once the clock starts ticking we feel like we’re contained within that time-frame. So it gets darker as the play goes on and you feel the pressure of time which drives it forward at a pace. There’s a clock ticking on the action.
Could you tell us a bit more about the design?
Is it just about the dresses and the wigs? You could set it in a billiard room in 2014 or set it anywhere and make it fit. But our choice is to do it in period dress but there’s a slight twist in some of Mrs Hardcastle’s garbs with her new moneyed aspirational quality is dressed in a traditionally cut dress but her and her son Tony have got these leopard prints which are a bit coarse and ugly. She’s out of kilter as to what is fashionable.
Do you enjoy doing farce and physical comedy?
I do but what goes alongside it of course is a massive amount of text and you have to get the text clear. It’s not just a play about wigs and big dresses. When you start looking at the text there’s loads of detail and colour to be had out of it. So [in rehearsal] we’re combining the text work with trying to get it on its feet with music and physical comedy. It’s about making sure it’s a complete approach.
There’s always been some great music in the NBs productions. Could you tell us about how it’s used in this one?
There’s very little music written in the play. There is a song that exists for Kate but I’m not sure it was ever put in a production. I looked at that and thought I don’t want to do that. But there is one song in the pub with Tony Lumpkin that has become a bit bigger than you’d normally expect. I always like to think of the music as a stepping stone to something else – it’s not a hurdle to get over.
So it’s about true love but folly as well?
The hunt is on in this play for relationships, for love and some of it is unrequited and some of it is true, so it’s got all those elements in it. There’s a yin and yang going on because one of the central young couples are besotted and have a problem because they can’t consummate it. But in the other couple one of them can’t understand love and by the end of it does whereas Kate is searching for love. So love drives the play on, it sort of makes the world go round.
Would you say it has a kind of soap opera element?
I think it just exposes our human conditions. We can all recognise the situations that you see, because we’ve all been in them: we’ve fallen in love, we’ve gossiped, we’ve been outraged, we’ve laughed like a drain. We’re all capable of having that span of emotion within us and what we’re trying to do is take that and really embrace it. The vibrance and the energy of it should win through.
Photos: Nobby Clark
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Click here to see Rich Jevons’ review on The Stage website.