Theatre
Back to life
Ted Whitehead
Wild Oats (Aldwych)
The Royal Shakespeare Company's latest revival provided one of the rare occasions in recent weeks when I have watched an audience leave the theatre without looking as if they had been cheated—in fact they looked as if they had had a quite unexpected treat.
The play was by an author I'd never come across before, John O'Keeffe, a blind Irishman who wrote over seventy dramas, farces and comic operas. After its first production in 1791, Wild Oats was frequently played during the Victorian era but was eventually forgotten, like the rest of his output ; this is its first revival in this century.
O'Keeffe operates within the security of a convention that doesn't ask for belief in the plot; but then his plotting is so intricate, so brilliantly ravelled and unravelled, that the question of belief hardly arises. Domineering old Admiral, Sir George Thunder, has a son Harry whom he plans to marry off to Lady Amaranth, his rich Quaker niece. Harry foils the plan by getting his friend Rover, an actor, to assume his identity and win the Lady's heart. (This leads to a hilarious scene when Rover, under the impression that Sir George is also an impostor, coaches him in his performance as blustering father). However, in time Rover discovers that his simulated passion for the Lady is real, and his conscience will not allow him to trick her into marriage with a commoner. What Rover has yet to learn, though, is that he himself is actually the son of...
Contrasted with noble Rover is hypocritical Ephraim Smooth, Lady Amaranth's steward, an altogether more inflexible Quaker who addresses everyone as 'Friend' ('Here's levelling!' cries Sir George. 'Here's abolition of title!'). Ephraim bends the knee to no man, but bends it in the end to a farmer's daughter who has captured his heart. In good Quaker fashion, he condemns a performance of As You Like It with the cry, 'This mansion is now the tabernacle of Baal.'
The play is partly concerned to rebut this unflattering vision of theatre, and actors, but the basic moral impulse is in the presentation of life as a performance in which the reality merges constantly into the role and the role, amazingly, into the reality. O'Keeffe brings this off by a dexterous manipulation of incidents and relationships, enlivened by a robust comic sense.
Patrick Godfrey skilfully creates the torn Quaker, white with lust and plain living. Norman Rodway revels in Sir George's extravagant gesture and salty expression ('You've made great haste in cracking your walnuts,' describes the pace of courtship); and he is well-matched by Joe Melia as his crafty old sea-dog valet. Alan Howard brings enormous stylea.nd charm to the part of Rover, a dashing hero for whom acting is a way of living, a man so much in love with theatre that even his spontaneous remarks are by Shakespeare.
The production leaps lightly across all improbabilities, considerably helped by Ralph Koltai's sets, which effortlessly match the quicksilver mutations of the plot. The eighteenth-century blend of high spirits and sentiment is potentially tricky for an audience weary of the one and wary of the other, but the director, Clifford Williams,' controls the mix perfectly. The RSC deserve O'Keefe, and O'Keeffe eminently deserves this splendid revival.
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