The Alchemist has a rich and varied stage history. Over the centuries the play has been treated as both an ensemble piece and a star vehicle, and with the exception of Bartholomew Fair it is the Jonson play that raises the most pressing questions in relation to setting, location, treatment of stage space, and theatrical realism. With Volpone, it is the most adapted of Jonson’s plays, the more radical rewritings including Francis Gentleman’s 1770 farce The Tobacconist, Eric Linklater’s The Atom Doctor (1950), later revised as The Mortimer Touch (1952), and Gregory L. Mortensen’s The Scoundrel (1989), and musicals such as John Waller’s Fiddlers Three (1965), Evelyn Rudie’s adaptation for the Santa Monica Group Theatre (1976), and Phil Whitchurch, Bob Carlton, Bob Eaton, and Julian Littman’s Face: The Musical (1996).
The Alchemist has also been deeply entwined with ideas about how, where, and even whether Jonson’s plays should be performed. During the course of the eighteenth century, only the popularity of Abel Drugger appears to have kept the play on the stage; it disappeared for much of the nineteenth century, and even after a run of fine revivals in the early twentieth century it was often viewed as a museum piece – too complicated, tough, technical, or bawdy to survive. The strategies adopted in relation to set and costume have also varied. Some have argued that The Alchemist is too embedded in its original Jacobean setting to bear updating; others have thought, with Katherine Duncan-Jones, that ‘there is a point where topicality and timelessness converge’ (New Statesman, 28 January 2002). In addition, questions have also been raised about performance style itself, some critics and producers contending that The Alchemist only functions theatrically as a high-octane farce, and others suggesting that it demands a more realistic or naturalistic style of playing. Factors such as the pacing of a production – especially in the later stages of the play – and the balance of physical and verbal elements have posed a particular challenge to directors and performers.
The Alchemist has been crucial, moreover, in discussions of Jonson’s theatrical style and the best way of representing it in modern production. In a review of the Royal Shakespeare’s Company’s 1977 production, Irving Wardle expresses the hope that revivals of Jonson’s plays will continue, and that ‘our two main classical companies [i.e. the Royal Shakespeare Company and the National Theatre], having hammered out a modern style for Shakespeare, will now go on to perform this service for our second playwright’ (Times, 24 May 1977). In contrast, however, in an interview in the mid 1990s the director Joan Littlewood resisted such a perspective, worrying that the RSC would use ‘that Shakespearean voice’ for Jonson and declaring, ‘It’s so different that you cannot make that same noise’ (Schafer, 1999a, 160-1). Productions of The Alchemist suggest both the difficulty of creating a single ‘Jonsonian’ style – whatever it might be – and the persistence of the belief that such a project is viable. While none of the productions discussed here provides any definitive answers to the problems raised above, they demonstrate the vitality of the questions that this play continues to raise.
1610-1642: Origins and Early Performances
A starting point for any investigation of early performances of The Alchemist is Jonson’s statement on the title-page printed in the 1616 folio: ‘Acted in the yeere 1610. By the Kings MAIESTIES Servants’ (F1, 3E1). The information that it provides is less secure, however, than it may seem. ‘1610’ might refer to any period between 1 January 1610 and 24 March 1611, while playhouse closures occasioned by a severe outbreak of plague in London mean that the venue for the King’s Men’s performances is uncertain. Leeds Barroll’s detailed research suggests that the playhouses were closed for the whole of 1609, finally opening in February 1610 before being closed again from July to December 1610 (Barroll, 1991a, 180-6); however, it is possible that they opened as early as November, as the weather cooled and the numbers of Londoners dying from the plague decreased. As Peter Holland notes in this present edition (3.545), the play’s fictive date is 1 November 1610. The Alchemist may, therefore, have been one of the plays first performed at the King’s Men’s newly acquired indoor playhouse in the Blackfriars precinct on the edge of the city of London.
In The Alchemist, Jonson draws on the general conventions of the Jacobean playhouse and the specific associations of the Blackfriars playhouse itself. The play is set in London during a time of plague, and it gains something of its power from the fact that the playhouse – a room in the Blackfriars precinct – is made to represent not an exotic locale, but a room in the Blackfriars precinct. Much of the play’s theatrical vitality derives from its physical action – the near-farcical whirl of characters onto, off, and through the stage – its attention to sound (notably the loud bang with which the alchemist’s laboratory explodes in Act 4, Scene 5), its linguistic excess, and its attention to the details of clothing and to props such as the gingerbread with which the unfortunate Dapper is gagged. (For further discussion of the staging see Schafer and Cox, 2013.) All of these factors appear to be tailored for the performance venue, which had a relatively small stage, crowded by boxes on either side and often occupied not only by actors but also by the most wealthy – or pretentious – members of the audience. Jonson’s attention to these factors is suggested in both The Alchemist, and a later Blackfriars play, The Devil Is an Ass, the prologue of which directly engages with these stage-sitting spectators.
Yet the first documented performance of The Alchemist took place not in London but at Oxford in September 1610, when Henry Jackson reported in a Latin letter to his friend ‘G. P.’:
Recently the king’s stage actors were here. They performed to great applause, the theatre being full. But they rightly seemed impious to pious and learned men because, not being content to injure alchemists, they most foully sullied the Holy Scriptures themselves. Of course they carped at Anabaptists so that (their own) audacity would hide under this mask. … our theologians … I’m sorry to say, gathered (there) very eagerly … our stage has never sounded with greater applause than when that masked scoundrel entered, who impiously and extravagantly defiled the Scriptures so as to place the Anabaptists’ feigned sanctity before the spectators to be derided[.]
(Elliot, 2004, 2.1037; for the Latin original see 1.387, and Tillotson, 1933b, 494)
Although he conveys the enthusiasm of other spectators, Jackson’s own disapproval of The Alchemist is clear, as is his belief that it merely uses satire of the Anabaptists to conceal its scorn for Christianity itself. He may not have been alone in this view, if Robert Herrick’s comment that some spectators ‘once hissed’ the play is accurate (Poetical Works, ed. Martin, 1956, 150).
Despite the disapproval of commentators such as Jackson, The Alchemist went on to be one of the most popular plays of the early seventeenth century. The next recorded performance was at court, when The Alchemist was one of six plays mounted by the King’s Men during the Christmas season of 1612-13 (Cook and Wilson, 1962, 56). Another court performance took place on 1 January 1623, and in 1631 the Master of the Revels, Sir Henry Herbert, recorded that he had been given £13 as his share of the proceeds from a performance, presumably at the Blackfriars playhouse, on 1 December (Bawcutt, 1996a, 139, 174). The play’s popularity endured into the late 1630s. On 21 January 1638, Lady Anne Merrick wrote to a friend, Mrs Lydall, ‘I could wish myself with you, to ease you of this trouble, and withal to see The Alchemist, which I hear this term is revised’ (J. Munro, 1909, 1.443), and Sir Humphrey Mildmay took Mistress James and ‘her goodman’ to see it on 18 May 1639 (Bentley, 1941-68, 2.678).
A fair amount is known about the actors who took part in these performances. The earliest cast-list for The Alchemist, printed in the 1616 folio, lists Richard Burbage, John Heminges, John Lowin, William Ostler, Henry Condell, John Underwood, Alexander Cooke, Nicholas Tooley, Robert Armin, and William Eaglestone (whose name also appears in early records as ‘Ecclestone’ or ‘Eccleston’), but does not assign roles. Drugger’s question, ‘did you never see me play the fool?’ (4.7.69) suggests that he was played by Armin, the company’s main performer of clowns and fools. Further information about early casting is recorded in annotations in a seventeenth-century hand in a copy of the folio (Huntington Library RB 499968), first published by James A. Riddell in 1969. These attribute roles as follows:
Subtle: ‘Richard Burbage’
Face: ‘Nat: Feild’ (i.e. Nathan Field)
Doll: ‘Richard Birch’
Dapper: ‘John Vnderwood’
Lovewit: ‘Bentley’ (i.e. Robert Benfield?)
Epicure Mammon: ‘John Lowin’
Surly: ‘Hen: Condell’
Ananias: ‘Nich: Tooley’
Kastril: ‘Will: Eglestone’
(Riddell, 1969, 290-1)
As Riddell concludes, this probably represents the cast of a performance between 1615/16, when Field joined the King’s Men, and March 1619, when Burbage died. Ostler, who appears in the folio cast, had died in December 1614. With the exception of Field, Birch, and Benfield, the latter of whom joined the King’s Men around 1615 and may have replaced Ostler (Gurr, 2004b, 220) all of these actors could also have taken these roles in the earliest performances. Field perhaps replaced Heminges as Face. ‘Richard Birch’, who is also recorded in this copy of the folio as Lady Politic Would-Be in Volpone, is probably a mistake for George Birch, who was apprenticed to Heminges on 4 July 1610 and who married the daughter of a fellow King’s Man, Richard Cowley, in 1619 (see Kathman, 2005, 232-3; Kathman, 2004, 8-9; Astington, 2010, 191).
By the 1630s, many of the original cast and their immediate successors had died or retired. Little is known about the parts taken by their replacements aside from the comments in James Wright’s theatre history Historia Histrionica, which indicate the parts taken by Lowin and by Joseph Taylor, who joined the King’s Men in 1619: ‘Lowin used to act, with mighty applause, Falstaff, Morose, Volpone, and Mammon in The Alchemist; Melantius in The Maid’s Tragedy … Taylor acted Hamlet incomparably well, Iago, Truewit in The Silent Woman, and Face in The Alchemist’ (Wright, 1699, 4). Lowin and Taylor were among the most famous and well-regarded actors of their day, and it is striking that Lowin does not appear to have switched to a larger role in The Alchemist, apparently preferring to retain the potentially show-stopping part of Mammon.
It is, of course, one thing to list the actors involved in a particular production, another to begin to work out how this information might affect our understanding of the play in performance. An important starting point for The Alchemist lies in the composition of the King’s Men, and their dominant status within the Jacobean and Caroline theatre industry. In the first decade of the reign of James I, the King’s Men began to receive levels of support that were not provided to other companies, and the foundations for their extraordinary durability were laid. Payments from the King to supplement their income during periods of plague were made as early as 1604, and in April 1609 and March 1610 they were paid the sums of £40 and £30 respectively for ‘private practice’ in preparation for court performances, ‘being restrained from public playing within the City of London in the time of infection’ (Cook and Wilson, 1962, 47-8). No other company received this financial support, and it is unsurprising that in the period from 1603 the King’s Men attracted a number of players from other London companies: John Lowin from Worcester’s Men around 1603; William Ostler and John Underwood from the Children of the Queen’s Revels around 1609; and Nathan Field and Robert Benfield from the Lady Elizabeth’s Men around 1615-16 (see Gurr, 2004b, Appendix 1; Astington, 2010, Appendix).
Performing plays such as The Alchemist was both an assertion of the King’s Men’s pre-eminence and a compelling demonstration of their prowess. In an essay on casting and marketing Jonson’s plays in the late twentieth century, former RSC casting director Genista McIntosh comments of The Alchemist:
You can have people working away very hard at the top – but you can’t get the thing going – and if you have too much energy going in at the top and not enough going underneath it falls flat. … You do need really good actors all the way down with Jonson, an ensemble, because they do have to inhabit, to have a world and a life for those characters.
(McIntosh, 1999, 144)
With its striking central characters – including a bravura role for the company’s leading boy actor – and its gallery of comic oddities, The Alchemist is an ensemble piece par excellence. It is worth remembering, moreover, the repertory system employed by Jacobean and Caroline companies, in which plays were performed on a daily rotation, rather than in runs. Spectators would therefore have had the opportunity to see the King’s Men in a dizzying variety of roles in any given fortnight; although day-by-day records from the early seventeenth century do not survive, it would in theory have been possible to see Joseph Taylor in the roles assigned to him by Wright – Hamlet, Iago, Truewit, and Face – on successive days.
The design of The Alchemist and its early popularity both suggest the extent to which Jonson knew and trusted in the capabilities of his actors, the majority of whom were experienced at performing in his plays. Ostler, Underwood, and Field had appeared in performances by the Children of the Chapel of Cynthia’s Revels (1600) and Poetaster (1601), and Field featured in a leading role in a performance of Epicene by the Children of the Queen’s Revels in 1610 (see Munro, 2005, 185). Others had appeared in Chamberlain’s/King’s performances of Every Man In His Humour (1598), Every Man Out of His Humour (1599), Sejanus (1603), and Volpone (1605). Indeed, some of the roles suggest that Jonson had specific actors in mind. Lowin, who played Sir Epicure Mammon, was a tall man, noted for his physical bulk. He took over the role of Falstaff and was probably the first King Henry in Shakespeare and Fletcher’s Henry VIII, or All is True (1613); his physique is mentioned in plays such as Fletcher’s The Wild-Goose Chase (1621), in which his character, Belleur, is described as the ‘tall fat fellow’ (Dramatic Works, ed. Bowers, 3.1.121).
Specific characters appear to have caught the attention of the audience. Henry Jackson’s report, quoted above, suggests that Oxford spectators were particularly taken with Jonson’s satirical treatment of Tribulation and Ananias’s hypocrisy, and by the virtuoso manner in which Subtle deceives them. The theatrical impact of the stage ‘puritan’ is also suggested in Jonson’s return to this character type a few years later, in Bartholomew Fair’s Zeal-of-the-Land Busy, and in allusions to The Alchemist in other seventeenth-century texts. In an account of the spiritual crisis suffered by a gentlewoman named Joan Drake, and her encounter with a divine, John Dod, John Hart writes:
But to return to Mr Dod’s progress with her, it was yet none at all. She remained still the same, seemed not to hear or regard his speeches and words spoken, would laugh and jest at all he said in derision, in her thoughts likening him unto Ananias, one whom at a play in the Blackfriars she saw scoffed at for a holy brother of Amsterdam . And when he would look pitifully upon her and reprove her for such strange carriages and speeches, telling her what a shameful thing it was so to laugh and jest at heavenly things, she usually replied, ‘ Why, then, seeing you see what a wicked creature I am, why do you trouble yourself any more with me?’
(John Hart, 1647, 26-7; see Pritchard, 1994, 94)
Joan Drake is all too aware of the similarity between her would-be counsellor and Jonson’s satiric stage puritan, and this makes her yet more convinced that she is unworthy of salvation. Allusions in other plays also suggest the continuing impact of particular characters and plot-structures from The Alchemist. In Richard Brome’s The City Wit, probably performed by the Children of the Revels at the Salisbury Court playhouse around 1629-32, three characters, Crasy, Crack, and Doll Tryman, agree to be linked ‘By indenture tripartite … like Subtle, Doll, and Face’, and their plots take the form of a sustained allusion to Jonsonian structures and motifs (Brome, 1653, 318; see also Schafer, 2010).
The Alchemist was also seen outside London, at the indoor theatre on Werburgh Street, Dublin, established around 1635 by John Ogilby with the support of Sir Thomas Wentworth, the King’s Lord Deputy in Ireland. Wentworth appears to have seen the theatre as a crucial part of what Alan J. Fletcher calls his ‘general program for Dublin’s social upgrading’ (2000, 261). Located in a fashionable area of the city, the Werburgh Street playhouse was an indoor theatre similar to the Blackfriars. Ogilby also recruited among the London companies, taking advantage of a prolonged outbreak of plague to hire James Shirley, at that time resident dramatist for Queen Henrietta Maria’s Men, and a clutch of English actors (see A. H. Stevenson, 1942-3; Fletcher, 2000, 267-71; Dutton, 2006). The Alchemist was revived alongside plays by Fletcher and Middleton, and the appropriation of plays performed at Blackfriars and owned by the King’s Men is in keeping with the aspirational tone of the project.
A new prologue, written by Shirley, pays tribute to the recently deceased Jonson:
The Alchemist, a play for strength of wit
And true art made to shame what hath been writ
In former ages – I except no worth
Of what or Greeks or Latins have brought forth –
Is now to be presented to your ear.
For which I wish each man were a Muse here,
To know and in his soul be fit to be
Judge of this masterpiece of comedy,
That when we hear but once of Jonson’s name,
Whose mention shall make proud the breath of Fame,
We may agree, and crowns of laurel bring
A justice unto him the poets’ king.
But he is dead; Time, envious of that bliss
Which we possessed in that great brain of his,
By putting out this light hath darkened all
The sphere of poesy, and we let fall,
At best, unworthy elegies on his hearse,
A tribute which we owe his living verse,
Which though some men that never reached him may
Decry, that love all folly in a play,
The wise few shall this distinction have,
To kneel, not tread, upon his honoured grave.
(Fletcher, 2000, 442)
Many of Shirley’s prologues and epilogues complain about the unresponsiveness and hostility of the Dublin audience, and a hint of that criticism is also found here, in the prologue’s expressed desire that spectators be worthy of judging Jonson’s ‘masterpiece’. Intriguingly, the prologue also suggests two opposing views of The Alchemist. The opening lines employ the terms often used to describe fashionable Caroline drama, praising the play for its ‘strength of wit / And true art’ and comparing favourably it with ancient Greek and Roman drama. In the closing lines, however, Shirley admits that some of his contemporaries, ‘men that never reached’ (comprehended) Jonson, apparently complain that The Alchemist does not contain enough folly. The Alchemist was, perhaps, too pointedly satirical for such spectators, or not broad enough in its comedy.
1660-1720: New Theatres, New Actors
No performances of The Alchemist are recorded between 1642 and 1660, the period of the Civil War, Republic and Commonwealth, during which the commercial theatre was suppressed. However, this does not necessarily mean that the play disappeared entirely from view. Surreptitious or private stagings of The Alchemist may have taken place, alongside known performances of plays by Fletcher and others, and excerpts from the play emerged in print, and perhaps in the playhouse, in the form of a droll. A short-lived theatrical phenomenon, drolls were short, comic adaptations of earlier plays, which appear to have been performed at venues such as the Red Bull, one of the few pre-war playhouses still actively used for entertainment in this period (see Hotson, 1928, 47-9; Randall, 1995, 147-56). Francis Kirkman’s The Wits, or Sport Upon Sport, a collection of drolls published in 1662, includes ‘The Empiric’, a short piece featuring Face, Subtle, Drugger, and Ananias, adapted from Acts 1 and 2 of Jonson’s play and presented with the summary, ‘Under the notion of his knowledge in chemistry, he cheats a grocer and a precisian’ (Kirkman, 1662, 159). The main Drugger scenes, Act 1, Scene 3, and Act 2, Scene 6, are run together, with the references to Kastril and Dame Pliant omitted, ending with the instructions for the shop sign and the gift of tobacco, at which point they are interrupted by the appearance of Ananias, relocated from Act 2, Scene 5. The considerable theatrical appeal of this adaptation lies not just in the combination of the popular characters Ananias and Drugger – the latter of whom was to achieve cult status in the following century – but in the linguistic exuberance of Subtle and Face’s catechism on alchemical terms.
When the playing companies were allowed to regroup and resume their commercial activities after the restoration of Charles II, The Alchemist was one of the first plays staged. ‘A Prologue to the Revived Alchemist’, printed as a broadside around 1660, capitalises on the relative inexperience of the unknown company that performed it:
The actors are in question, not the bard,
How they shall humour their oft-varied parts
To get your money, company, and hearts,
Since all tradition, and like helps are lost.
As in many early Restoration prologues, the performers are presented as cut adrift from theatrical tradition and from the linear descent of a role from actor to actor, due to the hiatus of nearly twenty years. Here, the prologue alleges, the situation is exacerbated by the fame of individual roles within Jonson’s play, and the potential reactions of ‘stagers’ or experienced playgoers:
Reading our bill new pasted on the post,
Grave stagers both one to the other said,
‘The ALCHEMIST? What! Are the fellows mad?
Who shall Doll Common act? Their tender tibs
Have neither lungs, nor confidence, nor ribs.
Who Face and Subtle? Parts all air and fire!
They whom the author did himself inspire,
Taught, line by line, each title, accent, word,
Ne’er reached his height; all after, more absurd,
Shadows of fainter shadows, wheresoe’er
A fox he pencilled, copied out a bear.’
(Danchin, 1981, 1.53-4)
The prologue is simultaneously pre-emptive self-depreciation and advertisement, especially when we note that the ‘stagers’ complain that not even the original performers of the roles – instructed, it is claimed, by Jonson himself – were up to the task. Whether or not these claims are true, the strategy apparently worked, as a number of performances of The Alchemist are recorded in the early 1660s. By the middle of 1661, if not earlier, it had been claimed by the King’s Company, founded and managed by the pre-war courtier and playwright Thomas Killigrew. Pepys saw them perform it on 22 June 1661, and described it as ‘a most incomparable play’ (Pepys, 1970-83, 2.125); it was also seen by two Dutch visitors to London, Jacques Thierry and Will Schellinks, on 13 February 1662 (Seaton, 1935, 333, 335), and by both Dr Edward Browne and Rev. John Ward in 1662 (Noyes, 1935, 106; Kennedy-Skipton, 1960; Kennedy-Skipton, 1961).
The cast for the King’s Company’s performances in the 1660s is suggested by information recorded by John Downes in his history of the Restoration stage, Roscius Anglicanus, and in a copy of the 1616 folio now owned by Indiana University Library (PR2600.C16.v.1):
Subtle: Walter Clun [later replaced by William Wintersell]
Face: Michael Mohun
Doll: Katherine Corey, née Mitchell
Dapper: Robert Shotterell
Drugger: Thomas Loveday
Mammon: William Cartwright
Surly: Nicholas Burt
Ananias: John Lacy
Tribulation: Thomas Bateman
Dame Pliant: Margaret Rutter
Lovewit: William Wintersell
(Downes, 1708, 4-5; Wondra)
Ward commented in 1662 that ‘two parts were acted well, the doctor and the puritan, the latter incomparably’ (Folger Shakespeare Library, MS V.a.292; Kennedy-Skipton, 1960, 494), and it is probably Clun and Lacy to whom he refers. With the exception of Bateman, the male performers listed here all appear to have been active as performers before 1642. Clun (born c. 1620) and Burt (born c. 1620?) were reputed to have begun their careers as a boy actor at Blackfriars and may have performed in The Alchemist there in the late 1630s or early 1640s. John Aubrey even speculated that Clun was Jonson’s illegitimate son, based on the facial resemblance between the two men: ‘Ben Jonson had one eye lower than t’other, and bigger, like Clun the player; perhaps he begot Clun’ (Electronic Edition, Early Lives: Aubrey). Mohun (born c. 1620) and Shotterell (also spelled Shatterell, born 1616) were successively members of Queen Henrietta Maria’s Men and Beeston’s Boys. Loveday (born c. 1616) performed with the Children of the Revels in the early 1630s, Wintersell (born c. 1620) may have been a member of Queen Henrietta Maria’s Men, and Lacy (born c. 1615) was a member of Beeston’s Boys by 1639. (See Astington, 2010, Appendix, for the most up-to-date account of these actors’ careers.) Lacy even seems to have associated with Jonson during the final years of the playwright’s life, and provided much of Aubrey’s information (see Early Lives, Aubrey; Astington, 2010, 204). This suggests that the 1660 prologue’s complaint that ‘all tradition and like helps are lost’ may have been a strategic exaggeration, or that the unknown company for which it was written may have been an especially youthful or inexperienced group of actors.
Nonetheless, there were major differences between the pre-1642 and post-1660 commercial theatre industries. One of the most noticeable would have been the introduction of female performers. The first recorded performance by a professional actress took place on 8 December 1660, when the King’s Company staged Othello with a prologue composed by Thomas Jordan ‘to introduce the first woman that came to act on the stage in the tragedy called The Moor of Venice’ (Jordan, 1663, C2v-3; see E. Howe, 1992, 19). The 1660 prologue to The Alchemist quoted above, with its reference to the company’s ‘tender tibs’ – a term generally used of women – may suggest that actresses took part in this performance; they were almost certainly taking the roles of Doll Common and Dame Pliant by the time Pepys saw the play in June 1661. Katherine Corey, the first recorded actress to play Doll on 16 December 1661, was one of four actresses recruited by Killigrew in 1660; a skilled comedian who often played older women, her success in The Alchemist is suggested by Pepys’s tendency to refer to her as ‘Doll Common’ (Pepys, 1970-83, 7.422, 9.415; see Burnim et al., 1973-93, 3.493-5; Howe, 1992, 24; ODNB). Moreover, her performance seems to have left its mark on the role, which appears to have been played by actresses who specialised the kind of parts favoured by Corey for at least a century. Less is known about Margaret Rutter, who played Dame Pliant, although she is described as ‘tall, and fair, and bonny’ in Dryden’s Secret Love, or The Maiden Queen (1668) in which she played Olinda and Corey played her mother, Melissa (64, A4v).
In addition to the introduction of professional actresses, the playhouses themselves changed rapidly in the 1660s. Old Jacobean amphitheatres and indoor playhouses such as the Red Bull, the Cockpit, and the Salisbury Court were still in operation at the beginning of the decade, but they were superseded by new playhouses, designed and built along continental lines. In May 1663, the King’s Company were installed at the new Theatre Royal, Drury Lane, where they performed until it was destroyed by fire in 1672; a new playhouse, designed by Sir Christopher Wren, opened in March 1674 and survived until 1809. During this period, The Alchemist was only rarely performed at other venues. The new playhouses were small – the Theatre Royal apparently seated around 700 spectators – and, in contrast with the pre-1642 playhouses, they employed perspective staging. Pepys visited the Theatre Royal the day after it opened in May 1663, describing it as follows:
The house is made with extraordinary good contrivance, and yet hath some faults, as the narrowness of the passages in and out of the pit, and the distance from the stage to the boxes, which I am confident cannot hear. But for all other things it is well. Only, above all, the music being below, and most of it sounding under the very stage, there is no hearing of the basses at all, nor very well of the trebles, which sure must be mended.
(Pepys, 1970-83, 4.128)
Even if the changes that Pepys recommends were carried out, the new ‘distance from the stage to the boxes’ must have led to some changes in the performance of The Alchemist, which relies on communication between actor and audience.
Walter Clun, who played Subtle in these early Restoration performances, died suddenly in August 1664, the victim of a murderous attack; Pepys recorded the loss in his diary:
Clun, one of their [i.e. the King’s company’s] best actors, was the last night, going out of towne (after he had acted The Alchymist, wherein was one of his best parts that he acts) to his country-house, was set upon and murdered; one of the rogues taken, an Irish fellow. It seems, most cruelly butchered and bound – the house will have a great miss of him.
(Pepys, 1970-83, 5.232)
His role as Subtle was apparently taken over by Wintersell, but Pepys, for one, missed Clun. In April 1669, he wrote, ‘hearing that The Alchemist was acted, we did go and took him [Dr James Pierce] with us, at the King’s House, and it is still a good play, it having not been acted for two or three years before; but I do miss Clun for the doctor’ (Pepys, 1970-83, 9.522-3). Pepys may have been particularly affected by individual performers, but his comments suggest the impact made by Clun, and the importance of Subtle as one of the play’s lynchpins.
Further performances of The Alchemist took place in 1674 and 1675, and it was in the repertory of the Smock Alley Theatre, Dublin, in the 1670s and 80s, when Francis Baker played Mammon and Shakespeare’s Falstaff (W. S. Clark, 1955, 75). Back in London in 1701, it was performed by the United Company at the Theatre Royal alongside ‘several new Entertainments of Dancing, by the famous Youth, under Nine Years of Age, newly arrived from the Opera at Paris’ (Post Boy, 29 March-1 April 1701; see Milhous and Hume, 2001-12, 23). Robert Gale Noyes deduces that the cast for performances at this time was the following:
Subtle: Colley Cibber
Face: George Powell
Doll: ?Jane Rogers
Dapper: Henry Norris
Drugger: William Pinkethman
Surly: John Mills
Ananias: Benjamin Johnson
Kastril: William Bullock
(Noyes, 1935, 110)
The United Company’s production of The Alchemist may have been provoked by rivalry between the Theatre Royal and Thomas Betterton’s company at Little Lincoln’s Inn Fields, which had broken away from the United Company in 1695. A satirical pamphlet, A Comparison Between the Two Stages (1702) depicts Betterton praying to Shakespeare and as a result reviving a series of Shakespeare’s plays; John Rich, manager of the Theatre Royal, then prays to Jonson, and mounts productions of Volpone, The Alchemist, and Epicene, ‘who had lain twenty years in peace; they drew up these in battalia against Harrythe fourth and Harry the eighth, and then the fight began’ (Comparison, 44). The author of this pamphlet depicts Betterton fighting back against Rich’s Jonsonian attack with Shakespeare’s Measure for Measure, but it seems that Betterton also attacked his rival on his own turf, mounting a rival production of The Alchemist at Lincoln’s Inn Fields on 9 October 1702. This was a rare appearance for the play away from the Theatre Royal, and one advertised as ‘Never Acted there before’ (Daily Courant, 8 October 1702). There is little evidence for the casting of this production; however, it may be significant that George Powell, the talented, dissolute leading man who probably played Face in the Theatre Royal’s production, had defected to Lincoln’s Inn’s Fields by May 1701 (see Scheil, 2003, 265; Burnim et al., 1973-93, 12.111).
These rival stagings of The Alchemist appear to have given the play new theatrical life, and further revivals followed in 1709 and 1713. The cast for seven performances at the Theatre Royal in 1709 included Powell, back with the company after stints at Lincoln’s Inn and the Queen’s Theatre:
Subtle: Colley Cibber
Face: George Powell
Doll: Margaret Saunders
Dapper: Henry Norris
Drugger: William Pinkethman
Mammon: Richard Estcourt
Surly: John Mills
Ananias: Benjamin Johnson
Tribulation: George Pack
Kastril: William Bullock
Dame Pliant: Susannah Cox
Lovewit: John Bickerstaff
(Daily Courant, 19 Feb 1709; Noyes, 1935, 110-11; H&S, 9.229)
In September 1709, the actors again chafed against Rich’s management, and a number defected to the Haymarket Theatre, where they performed The Alchemist twice in January 1710, according to a newspaper advertisement, ‘At the Desire of several Persons of Quality’ (Daily Courant, 14 January 1710). Five of the actors listed above had stayed at the Theatre Royal; therefore, at the Haymarket Robert Wilks played Face and Thomas Dogget played Dapper (Daily Courant, 14 January 1710, 23 January 1710; see Noyes, 1935, 113). Similar casts to the 1709 production appear to have been employed from 1711 to 1713 (see Daily Courant, 10 February 1711; Noyes, 1935, 113).
Evidence surrounding these revivals suggests strong casting throughout, as in earlier productions. Estcourt, who played Mammon, was a popular comedian; Downes praises his ‘easy, free, unaffected mode of elocution’ and describes him as a ‘superlative mimic’ (Downes, 1708, 51). Doll continued to be performed by an actress experienced in playing older women; Thomas Davies remarks that Saunders was ‘a very good actress, in parts of decayed widows, nurses and old maids’ (1783-4, 3.436). Pinkethman (known as ‘Pinky’), who played Drugger, and Dogget, who played Dapper at the Haymarket, were both popular comedians, although Pinkethman provoked some mixed reactions. The author of A Comparison Between the Two Stages described him as ‘A fellow that overdoes every thing, and spoils many a part with his own stuff’, while Downes called him ‘the darling of Fortunatus, he has gained more in theatres and fairs in twelve year, than those that have tugged at the oar of acting these fifty’ (Comparison, 199; Downes, 1708, 52). Dogget is described by Downes as ‘wearing a farce in his face … the only comic original now extant’, and Colley Cibber notes his ‘dry and closely natural manner of acting’ (Downes, 1708, 52; Cibber, 1740, 1.187). His appearance and technique are set out in more detail by Tony Aston: ‘Mr. Dogget was a little, lively, spract [brisk or alert] man … he never deceived his audience—because while they gazed at him, he was working up the joke, which broke out suddenly in involuntary acclamations and laughter’. Aston notes in particular Dogget’s use of expression and gesture, describing him as ‘the best face-player and gesticulator’(Aston, 1747, 15-16).
1721-30: Topicality
The Alchemist again seems to have slipped from the stage between 1713 and 1721, but the play took on renewed topicality in the wake of the South Sea Bubble crisis of 1720-1. Comparisons between the alchemist’s dreams of wealth and those of contemporary financiers were introduced as early as August 1720, when a ballad titled ‘A South Sea Ballad … To a New Tune called“The Grand Elixir, or the Philosopher’s Stone Discovered’ was published. ‘’Tis said’, the ballad claims,
that alchemists of old
Could turn a brazen kettle
Or leaden cistern into gold,
That noble, tempting metal,
But if it here may be allowed
To bring in great and small things,
Our cunning South Sea, like a god,
Turns nothing into all things.
In this atmosphere, it was only a matter of time before Jonson’s play was revived, and it was premiered at the Theatre Royal on 25 October 1721, where it ran for three nights in a row, still at that time an unusually long run. The play was presented with a new epilogue which was printed both as a broadside and in The Weekly Journal:
Old surly Ben tonight hath let us know,
That in this isle a plenteous crop did grow
Of knaves and fools a hundred years ago:
Chemists, bawds, gamesters, and a numerous train
Of humble rogues, content with moderate gain.
The poet had he lived to see this age,
Had brought sublimer villains on the stage;
Our knaves sin higher now than those of old,
Kingdoms, not private men, are bought and sold.
Witness the South Sea project, which hath shown
How far philosophers may be outdone
By modest st--sm--n that have found the stone.
Well might it take its title from the main,
That rose so swift and sunk so soon again;
Fools have been always bit by artful lies,
But here the cautious were deceived and wise.
And yet, in these flagitious monstrous times,
The knaves detected triumph in their crimes,
Wallow in wealth, have all things at command,
And brave the vengeance of an injured land.
Well! Since we’ve learned experience at our cost
Let us preserve the remnant not yet lost,
Though L--w, from France, be landed on the coast,
By sober arts aspire to guiltless fame
And prove that virtue’s not an empty name.
(Weekly Journal; or, British Gazetteer, 16 December 1721)
As Noyes notes, the prologue brings together the South Sea Bubble and a recent French scandal, the so-called the ‘Mississippi Company’, a scheme to colonise Louisiana to pay off French debt. It sets up a diachronic relationship between Jonson’s play – now rendered sweetly naïve by current events – and the behaviour of the ‘knaves’ involved in the South Sea and other get-rich-quick schemes. One of the prologue’s main targets actually attended the play. Applebee’s Original Weekly Journal noted that ‘On Wednesday night their Royal Highnesses the Prince and Princes of Wales were at the theatre in Drury Lane, and saw The Alchemist acted. There was a splendid appearance of the nobility and gentry; the famous Mr. Law and his son were there also’ (28 October 1721). John Law, a prime mover in the Mississippi scheme, was the ‘L--w’ singled out in the prologue and, as a nineteenth-century commentator noted, ‘the actor who delivered the epilogue might, if it pleased him, when he mentioned “L—w from France,” bow to the man himself’ (Hood, 1825, 101). The play’s new popularity outlived the immediate scandal, however, with further revivals in 1723, 1726 and 1728.
Some members of the 1709 cast were still attached to the play in the 1720s, although John Mills graduated from Surly to Face, with Elizabeth Wetherilt as Doll, John Harper as Mammon, William Wilks as Surly, Benjamin Griffin as Tribulation, and Josias Miller as Kastril. The performances of Colley Cibber as Subtle and Mills as Face around this time are described by Davies, who writes that Cibber acted his part ‘with great art’, while Mills ‘at the same time played Face with much shrewd spirit and ready impudence’ (Davies, 1783-4, 2.108). Griffin and Johnson were ‘much admired for their just representation of the canting puritanical preacher and his solemn deacon the botcher; there was an affected softness in the former that was finely contrasted by the fanatical fury of the other. – Griffin’s features seemed ready to be relaxed into a smile, while the stiff muscles and fierce eyes of the other admitted of no suppleness or compliance’ (Davies, 1783-4, 2.108-9). As Shearer West notes – and as Davies actually acknowledges – the description here appears to be heavily indebted to Peter van Bleek’s painting of the pair in these roles (1991, 27; Davies, 1783-4, 2.109). (For the image, see the reproduction in the Performance Archive.) Davies was less impressed by Harper’s performance as Mammon, complaining that he ‘seemed to have been taught by one who had juster conceptions of what was to be done in the part than the player could execute’ (Davies, 1783-4, 2.109). Wetherilt’s other roles include Widow Lackit in Oroonoko, suggesting that the pattern of casting Doll as an older woman persisted.
1731-1776: The Age of Abel Drugger
The popularity of The Alchemist was maintained. It was performed at the Theatre Royal in 1731, five times at the Haymarket Theatre in autumn-winter 1733-4 – the actors once again revolting against the Drury Lane management – and a further eleven times at the Theatre Royal between 1734 and 1736. 15 September 1735 saw a command performance attended by a flock of royal personnel: ‘her Majesty, their Royal Highnesses the Prince of Wales and the Duke, together with their Highnesses the Princesses Amelia, Caroline, Mary, and Louisa … The Alchemist was performed to a crowded audience with universal applause’ (London Daily Post and General Advertiser, 16 September 1735). Two productions were mounted at Covent Garden in 1740, under Theophilus Cibber, but it had returned to Drury Lane, with Cibber, by 12 February 1742 (see Noyes, 1935, 125).
The casting mutated slowly, as actors retired and new performers took their places. Colley Cibber played Subtle until 1733, when William Mills took over; John Mills played Face until 1737, and was succeeded by Charles Macklin, who played the part until 1748, and was described in 1744 as ‘the only JEW OF VENICE they have; as good a FACE in The Alchemist as any; an incomparable MALVOLIO; an unexceptionable CLOWN in all Shakespeare’s Plays’ (Daily Gazetteer, 10 November 1744). Performers in the role of Doll included Charlotte Charke, Kitty Clive, and Hannah Pritchard. Davies writes of Clive and Pritchard, ‘the former, by lessening the vulgarity of the prostitute, did not give so just an idea of her as the latter. Mrs. Pritchard, by giving a full scope to her fancy as well as judgement, produced a complete resemblance of the practiced and coarse harlot in Madam Doll’ (1783-4, 2.110). Harper did not give up the role of Mammon until 1739, and from 1742 it was played by Edward Berry, who kept it until his death in 1760. In the roles of the puritans, Griffin and Johnson lasted until 1740, when the roles were taken by Richard Neale (Ananias) and James Taswell (Tribulation).
However, the most important piece of casting was becoming that of Abel Drugger, a point recognised implicitly by Corbyn Morris in his 1744 book on comedy, in which his initial list of notable characters in Jonson’s plays reads ‘Volpone, Subtle, Morose, and Abel Drugger’ (30). The Alchemist’s shift from ensemble piece to star vehicle was propelled in part by the charisma of particular actors, and in part by changing tastes in comedy. As Lois Potter notes, and Stuart M. Tave explains in detail, eighteenth-century playgoers increasingly preferred lovable or ‘amiable’ comic characters, prizing ‘good nature’ and ‘good humour’ over satiric wit (see Potter, 2010, 86; Tave, 1960). Morris’s comments on The Alchemist are part of this tendency; he argues that Jonson’s characters are not as theatrically effective as Shakespeare’s because they are less likeable: ‘after you have been gratified with their detection and punishment, you are quite tired and disgusted with their company’. The secret of comedy, he argues, ‘lies in drawing the persons exhibited with such cheerful and amiable oddities and foibles, as you would choose in your own companions in real life’ (Morris, 1744, 30). This perspective underlies his response to Drugger, whom he finds ‘mean and despicable’ but ‘harmless and inoffensive in private life’ and, therefore, ‘most capable of any of Jonson’s characters, of being a favourite on the theatre’ (35-6). Morris’s essay was little-known in the eighteenth century; however, as Tave points out, ‘his accuracy as an early prophet of the path comic criticism was to take is unquestionable’ (1960, 139). His comments on The Alchemist likewise laid out the path that the play was to take on the eighteenth-century stage.
Drugger’s movement into the limelight is suggested in advertisements for The Alchemist in 1710, in which Pinkethman receives top billing for his benefit night: ‘The part of Abel Drugger to be performed by dapper Will Pinkethman’ (Daily Courant, 20 January 1710; see also Daily Courant, 23 January 1710). Pinkethman returned to the role in the 1720s, playing it until his death in 1725 (Alchemist, ed. Mares); after this it was played by Josias Miller and by Pinkethman’s son, William (see Daily Courant, 17 November 1726; London Daily Post and General Advertiser, 24 October 1739; see also Burnim et al., 1973-93, 11.331). However, for much of the 1730s and 40s it was dominated by Theophilus Cibber, Colley Cibber’s wayward son, who stamped the role firmly on the conscious of playgoers. Cibber first appeared in The Alchemist as Dapper, a role he was playing in 1723 (Daily Courant, 10 October 1723), but he had graduated to playing Drugger by 7 October 1731, his first recorded appearance in the role (Genest, 1832, 3.325). Cibber specialised in comic grotesques, also playing Pistol to much acclaim, and his performance as Drugger appears to have divided his contemporaries. Thomas Davies writes that he ‘was never commended for strictly adhering to nature, in the drawing of his characters … he mixed so much absurd grimace and ridiculous tricks in playing this part, that although the galleries laughed and clapped their hands, the judicious part of the spectators was displeased’ (1780, 54-5). As this suggests, at the root of Cibber’s performance, and the apparent reason for both its popularity and the unease that it provoked in some commentators, was its dependence on facial expression and gesture. William Cooke claims that Macklin said that Cibber ‘rather farcified this part too much; he was for making fun for himself, as well as the audience — a lamentable mistake for an actor!’ (1804, 110; for further comment see also Foote, 1747, 38-9). There appears to have been a self-indulgent pleasure in Cibber’s performance that might attract or repel spectators.
Cibber was also responsible for introducing some enduring pieces of stage business to the play. In the first, Drugger accidentally breaks an urinal in the alchemist’s shop. Thomas Wilkes claims that this came about by accident:
while the other personages were employed, rather than stand idle, [Cibber] was fiddling about the table of the alchemist; and by way of filling up time, took up the urinal, and held it to the light, when it by chance slipping through his fingers, broke to pieces; and he had presence of mind to put on an air of distress happy to the time and the place; it told to admirable purpose. He played the part afterwards as usual; but the audience obliged him to restore the accidental addition; and it has been ever since retained by every other performer.
(1759, 257-8)
Another piece of Cibber’s physical business is suggested in a mock letter printed in The Universal Spectator on 16 October 1742, written in the persona of Cibber to Alexander Pope as a response to insulting lines about the actor in Pope’s satire ‘One Thousand Seven Hundred and Thirty Eight’. ‘Cibber’ writes,
Faith, gentlemen, said I, you put me in mind of my playing Abel Drugger, where they clap me on the back to fight the angry boy: — And, ’faith, I do now think I am a match for him: — Ay, — here I could have him; — there I could hit him again; — here I punch him; — there again is a plump stroke; — brandishing about all this time the pen I had in my hand, as in the scene of Abel Drugger I do my arms[.]
The dashes here indicate that Cibber throws punches, and this piece of physical business foreshadows that of David Garrick’s Drugger, who joined with Kastril in beating Surly from the stage. It is difficult to know quite where a fight between Drugger and Kastril would have fitted into the play, but the whirling Cibber would have made an arresting presence on the stage.
A flavour of the performance is also evoked in a prologue written by Aaron Hill for Cibber around 1739, when he embroiled in a dispute with a former benefactor, William Sloper. The prologue specifies that Cibber ‘Comes slowly, and reluctantly, forward; stands silent, and sidling, twirling his hat--and, now and then, looking up, with a half-suppressed leer of irresolution’. The prologue is an attempt to re-ingratiate him with the spectators, yet it centres not on genuine contrition, but on the performance of contrition:
Sinners should all feel shame. So far plain fact is.
Yet some blush awkwardly---for want of practice.
Ah! What can move hard hearts---if yours be misses,
Whose penitential tweer stands crimped, as this is?*
[*Here he puts on Drugger’s attitude]
Not Abel’s three-tired squint more queerly showed him,
When the cracked urinal had half o’erflowed him.
Hem---now I’ll pluck up grace---and make confession,
Then (like snug papist)---tick, for new transgression[.]
(Hill, 1753, 3.21)
The prologue suggests the popularity of Cibber’s portrayal of Drugger, and the sympathy that the character could arouse in spectators; it also argues that the posture and expression – described here as a ‘tweer’ (a glance or leer) and ‘squint’ – that Cibber adopted were immediately familiar and recognisable.
Famous as Cibber’s performance of Drugger was, it was ultimately overshadowed by that of Garrick, who first played the part at a benefit performance for Macklin at Drury Lane on 21 March 1743. His appearance in the role was trailed as early as 4 March, when an advertisement appeared in The London Daily Post, and it was billed thus on the day of the performance: ‘The Part of Abel Drugger to be performed by Mr. GARRICK (Being the first Time of his appearing in that Character)’ (London Daily Post). Despite his fondness for – and brilliance in – ‘low comedy’, Garrick appears to have hesitated about taking on this role due to Cibber’s claim to it, and the danger that Cibber and others ‘would be on the alert to find out and expose his errors’ (W. Cooke, 1804, 110). His performance was widely acclaimed, Noyes rightly describing it as ‘one of the sensations of theatrical history’ (1935, 126). It did not, however, immediately overshadow those of others. Garrick and Cibber alternated the role in 1743-4; Garrick played it in 1744-5, when Cibber was away managing the Haymarket Theatre and playing at Covent Garden (see Burnim et al., 1973-93, 3.256); Cibber and William Collins both played it in 1745-6; and Cibber in 1746-7 (Genest, 1832, vol. 4; General Advertiser, 20 December 1744, 22 February 1746, 9 August 1746). Garrick does not seem to have gained an unchallenged hold on the role in London until 1747-8, when Cibber had again moved to Covent Garden (Genest, 1832, vol. 4; General Advertiser, 19 March 1748; Burnim et al., 1973-93, 3.257). Nonetheless, Cibber was playing Drugger in Dublin as late as 1752 (Noyes, 1935, 133; Cibber, 1752, 21).
Although Garrick adopted some of the business associated with Cibber’s interpretation of the role, his performance as Drugger was also sharply differentiated from that of his predecessor (for detailed discussion see Noyes, 1935, 126-43; Schafer and Cox, 2013). His contemporaries praised his ‘natural’ portrayal of the tobacconist, and it appears to have been less immediately showy than Cibber’s. Macklin reputedly said that ‘Garrick’s awkward, sober simplicity, at once announced the ignorant, selfish tobacconist; and he very properly left his audience to divert themselves with the very singular absurdities of the character’ (Cooke, 1804, 110). A detailed description of Garrick’s performance in The London Chronicle for 5-8 March 1757 appears still to be trying to differentiate it from that of Cibber: ‘yet how admirably does he [Garrick] exhibit the minutest circumstances, with the exactest precision, without buffoonery or grimace: — There is no twisting of features, no squinting, but all is as correct as if a real tobacco boy were before us’. Cibber’s ‘tweer’ was, apparently, not for Garrick.
Some of the details of Garrick’s performance come through in contemporary comments. A reviewer in 1762 drew attention to Garrick’s delivery of the line ‘My name!’, interpolated in Act 2, Scene 6, and its ‘mixture of surprise and pleasure’ (Craig, 1990, 488). There are also comments on his physical gesture and use of props. In 1744, Garrick wrote a satirical attack on his own acting, seemingly in order to forestall criticism of his forthcoming performance as Macbeth; it includes a detailed description of the movements, gestures and facial expressions required by his version of the urinal business originated by Cibber:
When Abel Drugger has broke the urinal, he is mentally absorbed with the different ideas of the invaluable price of the urinal, and the punishment that may be inflicted in consequence of a curiosity no way appertaining or belonging to the business he came about. Now, if this, as it certainly is, the situation of his mind, how are the different members of the body to be agitated? Why thus,----his eyes must be reversed from the object he is most intimidated with, and by dropping his lip at the some [sic] time to the object, it throws a trembling languor upon every muscle, and by declining the right part of the head towards the urinal, it casts the most comic terror and shame over all the upper part of the body that can be imagined; and to make the lower part equally ridiculous, his toes must be inverted from the heel, and by holding his breath, he will unavoidably give himself a tremor in the knees, and if his fingers, at the same time, seem convulsed, it finishes the completest low picture of grotesque terror that can be imagined by a Dutch painter.
(Garrick, 1744, 7-8; see also Garrick, 1832, 1.xi)
As this account suggests, the ‘natural’ quality of Garrick’s performance was based on careful calculation and skilled execution; moreover – as he acknowledges – there was also a strong element of comic exaggeration in his portrayal of Drugger.
The physical aspects of Garrick’s performance may have become more pronounced in later years; in 1758 it was said that he ‘distinguishe himself more by grimace than humour’ when he played in low comedy (Literary and Antigallican Magazine, January 1758, 20), and on 28 October 1765 a letter was printed in The Public Ledger in which ‘Publicus’ writes,
Mr. Printer, in your paper I observed lately, that Mr. Garrick is to appear soon in comedy. I will take the liberty to give him this hint, that the public hope he will leave off his stage tricks, and imitate nature, as the incomparable Shuter does, and not box with dexterity, as he used to do, out of character, in Abel Drugger.
Publicus alludes to the talented comedian Edward Shuter – who played Ananias in some performances of The Alchemist and was also a striking Amorous La Foole in Epicene – and to Garrick’s adaptation of the text, which appears to have required Drugger to join Kastril in challenging Surly in Act 4. The acting text published in Bell’s British Theatre in 1777 includes no detailed stage directions, but its additional lines for Drugger suggest the action that must provoke them (Garrick’s additions are in italic):
Kas. Hence, sir. [They fight. Exit Surly.
Did I not quarrel bravely?
Face. Yes, indeed, sir.
Kas. Nay, an I give my mind to’t, I shall do’t.
Drug. Well, and how did I?
Face. Very well;
But you must follow, sir, and threaten him tame;
He’ll turn again else.
After the discussion with Face about procuring Hieronimo’s old cloak from the players, Drugger exits, commenting:
Did not I behave well?
Will you be gone? — He won’t be here
In a hurry, I believe.
(Garrick, Plays, eds. Pedicord and Bergmann)
In Garrick’s version, Drugger imitates both Kastril’s language and his action, and the focus of the comedy is directed away from the ‘angry boy’ and onto the tobacconist. As Noyes notes, ‘Garrick’s reasons for assuming Kastril’s scene are obvious: [in this version] Drugger leaves the stage for the last time immediately after Surly’s departure, and Garrick realized the value of a vigorous exit’ (1935, 140). It also appears to have been popular: one of the many illustrations of Garrick playing the role shows him holding up his fists, in the style of a boxer (see the reproduction in the Performance Archive).
Garrick cut over 900 lines from The Alchemist, and the revised play would only take around two hours to perform (see Noyes, 1935, 143-8; Dircks, 1968, 48-9; Garrick, Plays, 5.318-26; Shargel, 2004). The changes include the excision of obscenities; notably, Subtle’s first line, ‘Thy worst. I fart at thee’ (1.1.1) becomes ‘Do thy worst. I dare thee’. Topical references and obscure jargon are also cut, and the parts of Doll, Dapper, Mammon, and the Anabaptists are reduced. The reduction in these roles is in part a result of Garrick’s realigning the play towards Drugger – his is one of the few parts expanded, albeit only by 37 lines – but they are also a production of the desire to avoid bawdy and obscurity. However, while Garrick’s version in some respects brought The Alchemist up to date, it also anchored it firmly in its original period, since another innovation was performance in period costume. On 20 March 1753 a benefit performance for Henry Woodward, who played Face for the first time that day, was mounted with ‘the characters all dressed in the habits of the time’ (Public Advertiser, 24 February 1753). The period costumes – Jacobean fashions filtered through eighteenth-century tastes – are clearly shown in Johann Zoffany’s painting (c. 1770) of Garrick as Drugger, Burton as Subtle, and Palmer as Face (see reproduction in the Performance Archive).
Alongside Garrick’s Drugger, the leading roles of Face and Subtle were taken by a string of actors. Mills was succeeded as Subtle by an actor named Bridges (his first name is uncertain, see Burnim et al., 1973-93,2.330-1), who also played Sir Giles Overreach in Garrick’s production of Massinger’s A New Way to Pay Old Debts. The role was then played by Edmund Burton; Burton and Robert Bransby, who played Mammon, were described by Francis Gentleman as ‘Dull, heavy, cold as dark November weather’ (1772, 50). More talented, and popular, was Henry Woodward, who played three different roles, Kastril, Face and Subtle, between 1737 and 1756; Woodward was an outstanding Mercutio in Romeo and Juliet, and was famous for his portrayal of Bobadill in Every Man In His Humour (see ODNB). James Palmer the elder and James Palmer the younger also took the role. The most prominent actor to play Mammon was James Love, of whom Davies wrote ‘The outline was well drawn … but there was a deficiency of glowing and warm tints which such a ripe dupe in folly required, and the character amply afforded. Love’s conceptions of the part were just, but his want of power to execute his meaning rendered his acting imperfect’ (1783-4, 2.109-10). Elizabeth Hopkins, one of the most prominent actresses to play Doll, was, like her predecessors, known for her portraits of older women; J. H. Leigh in The New Rosciad wrote of her, ‘View the old maid, coquette, or mater staid, / In each view genius, merit bright displayed!’ (1785, 35).
Despite the talents of at least some of these actors, Drugger threatened to alter the balance of the entire play, and to overshadow its supposed leads. His new dominance was established not only by changes to the text but also by Garrick’s own charisma as a performer. In 1759 a pamphleteer facetiously argued that Garrick was so good an actor that he ought promptly to retire, in order to give other actors a chance; he takes The Alchemist as a prime example, writing:
I saw Burton and Palmer plain enough till Abel Drugger came on, fiddling with his shop-keeper’s apron. He no sooner came on than away went Subtle, and Captain Face: says I, to one near me, ‘is not this monstrous, that Subtle and Face should go off the stage, at the time when Nab wants them?’ He answered that he thought it unaccountable, and that he was served so once before the last season; and that if he had recollected himself in that particular he would not have come to see Abel Drugger alone.
(Reasons Why David Garrick, Esq; Should Not Appear on the Stage, &c., 1759, 16-17)
Nonetheless, observant playgoers were able to distinguish the performances of actors other than Garrick. A performance on 3 December 1771, towards the end of Garrick’s career, received an unusually detailed review in The Theatrical Review. The cast on this occasion was as follows:
Subtle: Edmund Burton
Face: John Palmer the younger
Doll Common: Elizabeth Hopkins
Drugger: David Garrick
Dapper: William Palmer
Surley: Robert Baddeley
Mammon: James Love
Tribulation: John Hartry
Ananias: William Parsons
Kastril: John Burton
Dame Pliant: Helen Johnston
Lovewit: John Hayman Packer
(Gazetteer and New Daily Advertiser, 3 December 1771)
Although the author argues that ‘The Alchemist seems to owe much of the applause it receives, from the inimitable performance of our celebrated English Roscius in the character of Abel Drugger’, he does, unlike many reviewers, assess the performances of the other actors:
Subtle is one of the few characters in which Mr. Burton exhibits any tolerable degree of merit. The late Mr. Palmer rendered the part of Face very respectable; and the present Mr. Palmer is not far behind his predecessor. Sir Epicure Mammon is well represented by Mr. Love, and the under parts of Surly, Ananias, Tribulation, and Dapper are very well supported by Messrs. Baddeley, Parsons, Hartry, and Mr. W. Palmer. As to the female characters, they are of but little importance to the piece, and it is well they are not, unless they were better supported in the representation.
(Theatrical Review, 1772, 1.248-9)
The reviewer’s perhaps surprising assessment of the role of Doll Common reflects cuts to her scenes with Epicure Mammon, and the excision of the whole of her impersonation of the Queen of Fairy in Act 5, Scene 4.
The cult of Abel Drugger was reaching its height in the early 1770s, and Garrick began to face new competition in the role. The comedian Thomas Weston played Drugger in The Alchemist at Drury Lane to some acclaim in 1763-4, when Garrick was away on the grand tour (see Noyes, 1935, 146-7). Weston’s whereabouts in the following two seasons has been obscure (see Burnim et al., 1973-93, 16.5), but playbills in The Ipswich Journal show that he was in East Anglia, where he was billed as ‘from the Theatre Royal in Drury Lane’ (Ipswich Journal, 22 December 1764). During this time he reprised his role as Drugger at least twice. A bill published on 19 October 1765 advertised a performance at Bury St Edmunds, for the benefit of Weston and Charles Bannister, of Colley Cibber’s She Would and She Would Not, followed by Samuel Foote’s farce The Liar, with ‘At the End of the Farce, a Comic Scene taken from The Alchemist. To conclude with an EPILOGUE on HEADs, by Mr. Weston’. The Epilogue on Heads seems to have been a spin-off from George Alexander Stevens’s Lecture on Heads, first performed in 1764, and it is probable that both the epilogue and the scene from The Alchemist featured Weston. Weston was apparently capitalising on his success at Drury Lane, and on 2 November The Ipswich Journal advertised a performance for the benefit of Weston and his wife, Martha, of an adaptation of Fletcher’s The Prophetess ‘with a Farce called The TOBACCONIST: Or ABEL DRUGGER’, after which Weston performed the Epilogue on Heads ‘in the character of Abel Drugger’. The Tobacconist was a two-act adaptation of The Alchemist, focusing on Drugger, written by the actor and writer Francis Gentleman and possibly first performed in Edinburgh in 1760 (Burnim et al., 1973-93, 6.143). As I explore in detail below, it was to become closely associated with Weston in the following years.
In 1769 Weston returned to Drury Lane to play Drugger in a benefit performance of The Alchemist (Public Advertiser, 29 April 1769; a performance advertised for 19 May 1767 was cancelled: see Dircks, 1968, 53). His potential in the role appears to have caught the eye of Samuel Foote, manager of the Haymarket Theatre. In May 1770 it was announced that ‘Mr. Foote will bring out two new pieces at the Haymarket this summer, one entitled the Lawyer, the other Abel Drugger’s Jubilee’, and The London Chronicle added the information that ‘Drugger’s Jubilee is a burlesque parody upon the Jubilee at both houses; in which Mr. Weston is to personate the modern Roscius’ (General Evening Post, 15-17 May 1770; London Chronicle, 5-7 June 1770). The ‘Jubilee at both houses’ refers to Garrick’s The Jubilee – a play based on, and parodying, the pageant that he had planned to stage during the Shakespeare Jubilee in Stratford-upon-Avon in September 1769 – first performed at Drury Lane on 14 October 1769, and Henry Woodward’s Harlequin’s Jubilee, which opened at Covent Garden in January 1770. In the event, Foote decided not to have Weston impersonate Garrick; instead, on 15 October, Weston appeared – again for his own benefit – in Foote’s satire on Methodism, The Minor, and as Drugger in The Tobacconist (see Public Advertiser, 13 October).
This first London performance of The Tobacconist may have been marred by hasty preparation. According to The London Evening Post, which described the farce as a ‘disfiguration’ of The Alchemist, Gentleman ‘begged hard for mercy before the curtain was drawn up, as he said the players were all imperfect’ (13-16 October 1770). The reviewer was particularly unimpressed by the boxing match with which The Tobacconist concluded, writing that ‘for such gross characters to escape the pen of an Englishman, to an English audience, is reprehensible in the highest degree, and its being tolerated can only be account for from that great partiality the town has long entertained for Mr. Weston’s extraordinary comic abilities’. Nonetheless, Weston, Gentleman and other Haymarket actors performed in The Tobacconist on tour in Edinburgh in March 1771 (see Caledonian Mercury, 25 February, 4 March). Playbills in The Caledonian Mercury for 16 and 18 March advertise Weston as Drugger, Thomas Robson as Face, John Vandermere as Headlong, John Wimperis Dancer as Double Face, Thomas Lancashire (a leading Edinburgh actor) as Bawlwell, James Fearon as Knowlife, Gentleman as Subtle and Margaret Didier as Doll Tricksy.
Gentleman apparently revised the text between the Edinburgh performances of The Tobacconist and the second London performance, which followed in July 1771, and it was this version that appeared in print a few weeks later. Double Face and Bawlwell do not appear in the London cast-lists or in the printed play; there is only a trace of the latter in Doll Tricksy’s description of a suitor, ‘my slink-haired Methodist preacher, Bawlwell, who woos me in the style of a saint’ (Gentleman, The Tobacconist, 1771, 9). Gentleman appears to have omitted Mammon from his first version, but he appears here, along with Drugger, Face, Subtle and Doll Common, renamed Doll Tricksy. The Tobacconist adapts some sequences from the original play, such as Doll’s feigned madness and her logorrhoea, Drugger’s sign, and the explosion in Subtle’s laboratory. However, the narrative is extensively reworked. An ‘Advertisement’ printed with the farce in 1771 claims that the revision
was meant to give Mr. WESTON’s established merit in the character of Abel Drugger more frequent, familiar, and compact opportunity of showing itself than the old play can possibly afford; upon comparison, it will be found that very little of the original is retained, but a general idea, and the part of Abel Drugger, to which however, some additions have been made[.]
(Gentleman, 1771, A3v)
Miss Rantipole, a fashionable lady of fortune, appears in a self-contained exchange with Face and Subtle in Act 2, and Drugger engages in a fist-fight with Headlong (the farce’s closest equivalent of Kastril), Doll’s ‘fighting swain’ (42), in a version of the sequence that so outraged The London Evening Post in 1770.
The new version met with greater approval than its predecessor. The London Evening Post thought that Gentleman had ‘succeeded tolerably well’ in adapting The Alchemist to modern tastes, noting the ‘applause … liberally bestowed’ on Weston and the ‘repeated shouts of approbation’ given to the whole production (13-16 July 1771), while The Lady’s Magazine commented that ‘characters taken from the original are well supported, and the alterations made with judgement’ (2 [1771, 31). It also liked Miss Rantipole – ‘truly laughable, though scarcely close enough connected with the rest of the piece’ – and considered Headlong ‘a good satire upon the bruising gentry of England’. ‘Considered merely as an after-piece’, The London Evening Post wrote, it ‘has every necessary merit for the stage, and is extremely laughable and entertaining’. The Monthly Review (45 [1772], 151-2) considered The Alchemist itself ‘heavy and uninteresting’, but praised Weston’s ‘singular merit’ and described The Tobacconist as having ‘low vivacity, and that kind of wit which one may suppose to have been begotten by Punch on the body of the comic Muse’. Some of the Edinburgh cast retained their roles, but Subtle was taken by William Gardner and Doll by Sarah Gardner; Didier played Miss Rantipole and Gentleman moved over to play Mammon.
Jonson scholars have generally responded unfavourably to The Tobacconist. The actor and editor William Oxberry, who was to appear as Headlong in a later revival, declares that it bears as much resemblance to The Alchemist ‘as a dry a withered stick does to the oak from which it was originally cut’ (1818-25, 1.i). Noyes refers to it as a ‘monstrous performance’ and a ‘wanton patchwork’ (1935, 153, 155). However, its adaptation of Jonson is considerably more playful than these comments admit, and in its essentials it merely builds on the alterations made by Garrick, even going so far as to incorporate the pugilism of Garrick’s Drugger in its boxing sequence. As Richard J. Dircks comments, ‘Gentleman skilfully achieved his objective of writing a farce afterpiece acceptable to the audience of his day’ (1968, 45).
The success of The Tobacconist was also inflected by theatrical politics in the early 1770s. As an unlicensed playhouse, Foote’s Haymarket theatre was generally forbidden to produce ‘legitimate’ comedies and tragedies, but its manager had a summer patent allowing him to stage ‘tragedies, plays, operas and other performances on the stage’ when Drury Lane and Covent Garden were closed (Moody, 2000, 18). The Haymarket thus became, as Jane Moody describes, ‘the playhouse on the institutional border between the monopolists … and the minor establishments’ (18). It specialised in burlesque, pantomime, and satire, and stood in opposition to Drury Lane and Covent Garden, in part because Foote was required to wait until the legitimate theatres closed for the summer before he was allowed to begin his own season (Moody, 19-20). The Tobacconist in some respects exemplifies the Haymarket’s approach, appropriating and implicitly satirising Drury Lane’s own Alchemist and its obsession with Abel Drugger.
The spin-off itself bred spin-offs: Gentleman wrote another farce, The Pantheonites (1773), which featured Daniel Drugger, great grandson of Abel. This play includes a reference to the onstage popularity of Daniel’s forebear, who could be seen in London in autumn 1773 in the guise of both Weston and Garrick, who is probably referred to here: ‘Did you never hear of little Abel Drugger the tobacconist? … Oh la! They have got him in one of their plays; you would burst your sides to see him: when the great man who makes everybody laugh, and everybody cry, does him, you shall go’ (Gentleman, The Pantheonites, 1773, 15; see also Dircks, 1968, 51). In summer 1774 Weston appeared three times in an entertainment called Abel Drugger’s Return from the Fête Champêtre at Marybone Gardens. In keeping with the spirit behind Foote’s production of The Tobacconist itself, this was a satire of the fashionable entertainment of the fête champêtre in general and of the spectacular held by Garrick in August 1774 in particular (Noyes, 1935, 159).
Weston continued to perform in The Tobacconist until his death in January 1776, both at the Haymarket and at Drury Lane (see Noyes, 1935, 157). His portrayal of Drugger was compared favourably with Garrick’s by a number of commentators, and again the performer’s degree of ‘naturalness’ was a crucial factor. Davies, for example, writes, ‘the simplicity of Weston almost exceeded the fine art of a Garrick, whose numberless excellences may spare a tribute of praise to this genuine child of nature’ (1783-4, 2.107-8; see also Gentleman, 1772, 52-3; , 1776, 51; see also Noyes, 1935, 146-8). Another writer argued that
To analyze W-----n’s particular excellence in comedy, it may be comprehended in one article, viz. a plain and obvious simplicity of nature, which seems so entirely his own that from seeing him on the stage you are led to imagine it is no more that his usual conversation … imagination cannot form a more natural mixture of pusillanimity and consternation, that W-----n shews in Abel Drugger, on the breaking of the phial. Other actors would have only made you laugh under the same circumstance, but his powers do more, they oblige you to pity him; nor is there a moment, whilst he is on the stage in this character, in which you do not forget it is fictitious.
(Craftsman or Say’s Weekly Journal, 13 July 1771)
These comments suggest the art with which Weston convincingly appeared natural, and the affection that his portrayal of Drugger attracted. Many spectators enjoyed Garrick’s performance as Drugger because it reminded them of his virtuoso skill; St James’s Chronicle, or the British Evening Post commented, somewhat grudgingly, ‘the effect of Garrick’s Drugger was not from its actual merit, which was much inferior to that of Weston, but from an astonishment in the audience that the same man should appear excellent at points of such prodigious distance as the characters of Lear, Leon, and Drugger’ (28-31 January 1786). In contrast, Weston’s portrayal was appreciated because it seemed so effortless.
As these comments suggest, an expectation that the actor’s personality match – or appear to match – the character was beginning to inflect critics’ responses. The apogee of this trend appears in the account of the casting of an amateur actor as Drugger at the turn of the century. ‘As a caterer for the public, and to introduce novelty in the strongest degree’, The Reading Mercury announced:
we learn Mr. Watmore, landlord of the Three Tuns at [Windsor] is engaged to perform the character of Abel Drugger in The Alchemist on Wednesday next. From our knowledge of Mr. Watmore’s abilities, added to a figure the most strikingly adapted to the character, we have no hesitation in announcing he will be found the most complete and perfect Abel Drugger that has appeared on the English stage since the days of Mr. Weston.
(Reading Mercury, 13 August 1798)
The best Drugger, by this point in time, was the Drugger for whom no performance as such was necessary.
Garrick’s own portrayal of Abel Drugger did not long outlive Weston’s. A performance on 11 April 1776 was advertised as ‘the last Time of his performing that Character’ (Gazetteer and New Daily Advertiser, 11 April 1776), and a detailed account appeared in The Oxford Magazine:
Mr. Garrick having publicly declared that he should never perform the character of Abel Drugger in The Alchemist after last night, we were not surprized to find the house full as soon as the doors were open, and the most astonishing overflow we ever remember.
His performance of this character was always an excellent treat to all palates, but last night he seemed determined to give it a gout that should not soon be forgotten. — The bottle and boxing scenes he carried so high that the plaudits of the audience repeatedly shook the house. When Face asked whether he has any interest in with the players? He replied ‘Yes, I play the fool now and then: — but your worship! — they say I’m old enough to be wiser: — so I intend to leave of [sic] now, and grow melancholy and gentlemanlike’ — This stroke was universally taken and had a fine effect. However, when he had finished his part a murmur of sorrow run [sic] through the house as general as the applause had done during the performance.
(The Oxford Magazine, April 1776, 118)
Garrick wrote to his brother the following day, ‘I play’d Drugger for ye last time – the Morning Post will tell you ye whole of that Night. I thought ye Audience were mad & they almost turned my brain’ (Folger Shakespeare Library, MS Y.c.2600 [210], 2). If Garrick did not easily give up his hold on Drugger, Drugger’s hold on Garrick was also strong.
Although the mid and late eighteenth-century history of Abel Drugger and The Alchemist is dominated by the London performances of Cibber, Garrick, and Weston, alternative performance traditions existed elsewhere in the British Isles. As noted above, both Cibber and Weston toured with their versions of Drugger, and productions of both The Alchemist and The Tobacconist were mounted by non-metropolitan companies. The Alchemist was performed at the Smock Alley Theatre, Dublin, on 19 December 1738 (Greene and Clark, 1993, 238) and on 3 January 1758 it appeared at the Canongate theatre in Edinburgh, ‘for the first time here’, with Flora as an afterpiece; the only recorded performers are Henry Brown as Drugger, West Dudley Digges as Kastril, and Mrs Mynitt as Doll Common (Fragmenta Scoto-dramatica, 1835, 22; Dibdin, 1885, 96; see also Burnim et al., 1973-93, 2.362). The Tobacconist also travelled. It was to be seen in Dublin, Cork, Limerick, and Wicklow between the 1770s and the 1790s (W. S. Clark, 1965, 313; J. C. Greene, 2011), in Bungay, Suffolk, in 1773 (Ipswich Journal, 19 June), and in Shrewsbury in 1775 (Shrewsbury Chronicle, 26 August). John Cornelys, who had previously appeared with Foote’s company at the Haymarket in 1771, ‘was approved at Hull and York, in Abel Drugger’ around 1774-5 (Wilkinson, 1795, 1.203; Burnim et al., 1973-93, 3.500), and also appeared in the role in Norwich in 1776 (Norfolk Chronicle, 4 May). On 10 April 1776 The Tobacconist was revived at the Theatre Royal, York, as an afterpiece to Charlotte Lennox’s Old City Manners, itself an adaptation of Jonson’s collaboration with George Chapman and John Marston, Eastward Ho! (see Lockwood, 2005, 45). It was advertised at Portsmouth in September 1776, but, the Hampshire Chronicle relates, was replaced at the last minute by The Waterman after a dispute among the cast: ‘The bills indeed announced the exhibition of The Tobacconist, which drew a number of people to the house in order to see Mr. Moss in Abel Drugger; but a disagreement amongst the actors about the assortment of the parts prevented its being played’ (7 October 1776; see also 23 September).
1777-1816: After Garrick
The Oxford Magazine was thus mistaken both in its conviction that ‘nothing but [Garrick’s] singular excellence in Drugger has kept the comedy on the stage for many years past’, and its comment that The Alchemist ‘bids very fair to lie undisturbed upon the dramatic shelf since Roscius has taken his leave of it’. The Tobacconist was performed at Norwich in 1780, ‘by particular Desire’ (Norfolk Chronicle, 29 April), and in Derby, Newcastle-upon-Tyne, and Reading in the following decade. In a performance of ‘the much admired farce’ in Newcastle in 1784, Drugger was played by an actor named Hamilton (Newcastle Courant, 27 March), while the dancer William West played the role in Derby and Reading in 1782 and 1789. In 1782 The Derby Mercury noted that ‘ABEL DRUGGER is the only character that Mr. WEST (the Dancer) ever attempted to perform; we are glad that he played it on Wednesday to so crowded and polite an audience, who received him with the highest applause and marks of approbation’ (21 February). In 1789 his performance was advertised as ‘after the manner of Mr. Garrick’ (The Reading Mercury, 19 October), suggesting the long-term impact of Garrick’s portrayal.
In the meantime, The Alchemist returned to the London stage. In 1782 it appeared under its original title as ‘a Comedy (in two Acts)’ performed as an afterpiece to Edward Moore’s The Foundling at Drury Lane(Public Advertiser, 20 March 1782). The cast of this new adaptation, now lost, included some actors who were familiar in these roles:
Subtle: James Aickin
Face: John Palmer
Doll: Elizabeth Hopkins
Drugger: James William Dodd
Lovewit: John Hayman Packer
Mammon: Roger Wright
Surly: James Wrighten
Kastril: John Burton
Dame Pliant: Miss Simpson
A revival of interest in The Alchemist has been linked to political disputes of the early 1780s and, in particular, with Drury Lane manager Richard Brinsley Sheridan’s later comparison of William Pitt the Younger to the ‘angry boy’ Kastril (see Lockwood, 2005, 46-9). However, it is perhaps equally significant that these performances were planned as a benefit for Dodd, who played Drugger. Dodd was a skilled and versatile comic actor; he had created the role of Sir Benjamin Backbite in Sheridan’s The School for Scandal and was noted for his fine portrayal of Sir Andrew Aguecheek in Twelfth Night. In a letter to Garrick on 23 May 1765, Dr John Hoadly described Dodd as having ‘a white calf-like stupid face, that disgusted me much till I heard him speak and throw some sensibility into it … One excellence I observed in him, that he is not in a hurry, and his pauses are sensible, and filled with proper action and looks’ (Garrick, 1832, 1.184). The Morning Chronicle and London Advertiser hailed the double bill of The Foundling and The Alchemist as ‘a glorious benefit’, noting that Dodd ‘has often played Faddle [in The Foundling] well, but no one of his friends imagined he could do himself so much credit as resulted from his excellent performance of Abel Drugger’ (22 March 1782). This version of Jonson’s comedy seems to have omitted Dapper, Tribulation, and Ananias, suggesting that it once more focused on the tobacconist, and reduced Doll’s role in the narrative. Further productions, apparently of this adaptation, followed at Drury Lane in 1785 and 1787, with Dodd reprising his performance as Drugger.
The Tobacconist was also revived at the Haymarket in June 1784, in a one-act version that omitted Mammon and was probably altered by George Colman, at that point the Haymarket’s manager. The New Spectator expressed pity for The Alchemist, ‘being mangled to reduce it to one act’ (19 [8 June 1784], 4). The Morning Post speculated that ‘the intention was merely to preserve some small trait of the tobacconist’. It thought that Colman had expunged much of the wit along with the ‘most obnoxious’ passages, but commented that nonetheless ‘A new scene was introduced in which we discovered more vulgarity than humour’ (7 June 1784). John Kippling, making his debut in London, played Drugger. The Morning Chronicle thought that Drugger ‘was not the most happy adoption for a first appearance; the memory of Garrick and Weston, recent to recollection, producing a contrast not the most favourable’ (7 June 1784), yet his performance was generally well received, albeit with qualifications.
The reviews are instructive in the way in which they balance comments on Kippling’s physique with observations on his interpretation of the part. The New Spectator and The Town and Country Magazine (16 [1784], 283-4) both commented on his shortness of stature; the former also thought his voice ‘adapted to the character, but not strong enough’, while The Morning Post commented that his ‘countenance has that kind of vacancy admirably suited to the part, but that he ‘frequently spoils it by the most unnatural extortion and grimace’. It conceded, however, that he ‘was just and accurate in his delivery of the dialogue, and his gesture, particularly in the boxing scene, was judicious and characteristic’. For The New Spectator, the most admirable aspect of Kippling’s performance was its very lack of innovation: ‘He went through the character with judgement, and understood his author, which was proved by his not making an improper emphasis, or attempting to throw the character in a new light, to excite attention by singularity’. It is also, perhaps, a sign of the times that The Morning Chronicle, commented that ‘his acting was in general chaste, and nowhere disgusting’. Kippling went on to play Drugger in Manchester in 1788, where an epilogue was spoken ‘by Mr. Kippling riding on an ass’, and in Derby in 1789, when the farce was advertised as featuring ‘A BOXING MATCH after the manner of HUMPHRIES and MENDOZA’ (Hodgkinson and Pogson, 1960, 124; Derby Mercury, 5 March). The Tobacconist was drawn further and further into popular forms of entertainment.
The reduced version of The Tobacconist performed by Kippling may also have been used by John Emery, who played Drugger in twenty performances of The Tobacconist at York, Pontefract, Hull, and Leeds in 1796-8 (see Lockwood, 2005, 45-6). In 1798 Emery reprised the role at Covent Garden in his first London season (Morning Post and Gazetteer, 22 November 1798; see also Burnim et al., 1973-93, 5.82-90), and he was still performing it there in 1800. According to The Monthly Mirror, he ‘displayed some very fine acting, but it was all thrown away upon such wretched dullness’ (July 1798, 366). A hint of his approach to Drugger may be discerned in the same journal’s description of his performance as Frank Oatland in Thomas Morton’s A Cure for the Heart Ache: ‘he acts from his own feelings, and they direct him to the right application of his powers; his simplicity is without effort, and his stage habits are such only as the purposes of stage representation require’ (July 1798, 231).
Emery appears to have ceased playing Drugger when he became an established favourite with London audiences. However, a final flourish for The Tobacconist came in 1815, when Edmund Kean played Drugger for his own benefit at Drury Lane (Morning Chronicle, 24 May 1815). The production used the two-act version, and Kean’s performance was generally well received. Like Garrick, Weston, and Mr Wetmore before him, he was praised for the naturalness of his portrayal. The Theatrical Inquisitor commented, ‘Never was acting more chaste, more perfect, yet not the utmost distortion of grimace could have been half so effective in creating laughter’ (6 [1815], 388), while William Hazlitt thought that the performance was an ‘exquisite piece of ludicrous naiveté’ (1818, 111). Reviews record some details of his gesture, expression, and tone. The Theatrical Inquisitor praised his ‘stupid air of astonishment at Subtle’s predictions’, while The Morning Post thoughtthat his ‘astonishment and admiration when he receives the information that he was “born on a Wednesday” was in the happiest style of farce’ (25 May 1815). They also noted his ‘awkward gait and carriage’ (Morning Post)and ‘all that methodised stiffness with which the man of business measures his steps; his air was stupid and precise; the brilliance of his eye, which no change could conceal, peeping out from features thus moulded into dullness, gave to the whole an appearance of cunning, which added to the richness of the character’ (Theatrical Inquisitor). Hazlitt describes Kean after Drugger’s battle with Face, ‘strutting, and fluttering his cloak about, much in the same manner that a game cock flaps his wings after a victory’ (1818, 112).
However, The Morning Post considered that Kean’s acting lacked pace: ‘we should hope his pauses will be somewhat shortened, and his drollery will not be the less effective for consuming a smaller portion of time’, and this was not the only note of criticism. Infamously, Garrick’s widow came to see Kean’s performance, and allegedly wrote to him saying ‘Dear Sir, you don’t know how to play Abel Drugger’, to which he replied ‘Dear Madam, I know it’ (Morning Post, 23 October 1822). Nonetheless, The Morning Post recorded the euphoric response to the first performance, writing that the ‘exertions of Mr. KEAN … were most rapturously applauded to the end, by a house crowded in every part to such a degree, that many were obliged to retire without having obtained a sight of any part of the performance’, and he continued to play Drugger in the following years. In Edinburgh in 1818, for example, Kean paired A New Way to Play Old Debts with The Tobacconist; The Edinburgh Advertiser related that ‘Sir Giles Overreachis one of Mr Kean’s best characters … He performed Abel Drugger in the farce very well, and with considerable applause’ (10 April 1818; see also Dibdin, 1885, 282).
1818-1902: Neglect and the ‘Authentic’ Alchemist
After Kean’s performances as Drugger, all versions of The Alchemist appear to have fallen out of the repertory. The Tobacconist had gone out of fashion: as The Morning Post commented in reviewing Kean, ‘a farce of the old school has hardly sufficient business in it to keep the attention of the many fixed on the stage’ (23 October 1822). Yet without it there was nothing to propel a revival of Jonson’s play, since nineteenth-century taste continued to prize Shakespeare’s supposed amiability over Jonson’s satiric edge. The Alchemist, declared W. Moy Thomas in 1899, ‘strikes a modern audience as crude in conception and somewhat tedious, not to say puerile, in its humours … it enjoyed great favour in its day; but so did many pieces which the world has nevertheless very willingly “let die”’ (Graphic, 4 March 1899). Only hints of planned performances survive for much of the nineteenth century. On 21 November 1845 The Glasgow Herald mentioned an upcoming amateur performance of The Alchemist at the St James’s Theatre by a group including Charles Dickens, and rehearsals took place, in which Dickens’s Mammon was, according to John Forster, ‘as good as anything he had done’ (1872-4, 338). The idea of a full performance had finally been dropped by February 1848, but, as Jeremy Tambling suggests, Dickens’s encounter with The Alchemist left a lasting impression on his fiction (2012, esp. 6-7, 23-4). The play was also under consideration by a group of drama students for revival at the Vaudeville Theatre in 1886 (see Bristol Mercury 10 November 1886; Era, 13 November 1886), but again no full performance seems to have been realised.
The next fully-formed production of The Alchemist took place at Apothecaries’ Hall, London, on 24 and 25 February 1899, under the auspices of the Elizabethan Stage Society and the direction of William Poel. The production was in Jacobean costume and was mounted in one of Poel’s ‘fit-up’ stagings, a replica of the Fortune playhouse apparently consisting of ‘five flats framed at either side by relatively narrow wing-pieces’, the surround covered with pieces of tapestry curtain (O’Connor, 1992, 98). As Marion O’Connor convincingly demonstrates, this was not Poel’s usual ‘Fortune fit-up’, measuring 30 feet wide by 24 feet deep, which would not have fitted into the Hall (1992, 98; 1987, 61). The central flat contained a recess large enough to hold a chair, while the flats on either side contained entrances, the one on stage-left having a functional door. The stage-left exit was understood in Acts 1-4 to lead from an onstage interior to an offstage exterior, and vice versa for much of Act 5; the stage-right was surmounted by alchemical symbols and was understood to lead to Subtle’s laboratory (see O’Connor, 1987, 60-3). Because he did not need to pause to change the sets, Poel was able to run the play almost continuously, with only a ten-minute break, and he thus rediscovered something of the play’s pace (Daily Telegraph, 25 February 1899; Raw, 1990, 75-6). Although he may have cut as much as half of the original text (see O’Connor, 1987, 62), the adaptation appears to have been relatively unobtrusive – The Daily Telegraph referred to Poel’s Alchemist as ‘plain and undiluted’.
In its costumes the production gestured towards the seventeenth century and Garrick’s revivals with ‘The Characters all dressed in the Habits of the Time’. Yet simultaneously, this Alchemist was – like Poel’s other productions – an intervention in late-Victorian theatre aesthetics. Poel rejected the heavy, realist staging adopted by contemporaries such as Herbert Beerbohm Tree; his production of The Alchemist instead took place in one set, that set mimicking the interior of an Elizabethan playhouse – albeit not one in which The Alchemist was actually performed – with no drop curtain or elaborate scenery. The effect of Poel’s costume and mise-en-scène was to create what Cary M. Mazer has described as ‘a verisimilar picture of the theatre in which the plays were originally performed’, which demanded that audiences believe ‘that they were witnessing an archaeological picture of a past age’ (1981, 58). Yet, as Richard Cave rightly points out, this strategy demanded active collusion from spectators, who ‘were required to view a conscious enactment of Renaissance London and to participate in the creating of a historicist illusion’ (1999, 48).
Unlike Poel’s productions of Shakespeare, which some critics viewed with active distaste, his Alchemist was well received. This may have been because Jonson’s plays were thought to be more tied to the period of their composition and, thus, more suited to antiquarian handling. The Morning Post remarked, ‘a style of treatment which does not suit Shakespeare may very well suit Jonson, and whereas “The Merchant of Venice” is estranged from us by being represented after the manner of the time when it was written, such a play as “The Alchemist” can only be effectively rendered in some such fashion as that adopted last night at Apothecaries’ Hall’ (25 February 1899). The Era was clearly amused by Poel’s attention to detail, noting that ‘Mr Edward Bidwell supplied the hand “properties” of the sixteenth century, and Mr H. Kemp, optician, the Elizabethan spectacles that were used’ (4 March 1899), while The Daily News referred to the Elizabethan Stage Society’s ‘self-denying ordinances’, but was pleased to report that they ‘are not pedantic enough to discard the nineteenth century row of footlights’ (25 February 1899; see also Graphic, 4 March 1899).
Generally keen to make allowances for the amateur actors, reviewers praised the performances of Ernest Meads as Mammon, Michael Sherbrooke as Face, Doré Lewin Mannering as Subtle, Edith Ashby as a Doll Common with ‘much fire and vehemence’ in her encounter with Mammon (Stage, 2 March 1899), Samuel Allen as Drugger, Leonard Howard as Ananias, and Dorothy Cacey as Dame Pliant. The Stage singled out Mannering and Sherbrooke, both of whom went on to professional careers (O’Connor, 1987, 63):
Looking, with bald pate and prominent cheek bones, almost like a death’s head until Subtle donned the various caps and gowns he had to assume for business purposes, Mr. Mannering brought out very clearly the parallel phases of plausible cunning and repressed savagery … Mr. Sherbrooke, if he had moderated his facial play, would deserve great praise as the butler turned go-between, who became so popular a personage in his hands that the actor had quite a round of applause when he came forward finally to speak the tag [i.e. the epilogue].
(Stage, 2 March 1899)
Perhaps the greatest tribute to the production was that of William Archer, usually hostile to Poel’s work, who wrote, ‘The first encounter I had with Ben Jonson on the stage proved to me, what I had scarcely realised before, that he had the knack of writing great acting parts. … We have here at least ten figures, not one of which the greatest comedian need disdain’ (1923, 24, 87). In spite of his apparently costuming Drugger in the manner of Garrick’s portrait in the role (see Stage, 2 March 1899), Poel restored The Alchemist as an ensemble piece.
The production was revived for two performances at the Imperial Theatre in July 1902 and one at the New Theatre, Cambridge, in August. Percy Anstey took over the role of Face, and Herbert Jarman played Mammon (see Stage, 17 July 1902). The prompt-book for these performances survives in the Victoria and Albert Museum’s Theatre and Performance Archive, allowing us to trace Poel’s adaptation more closely (see O’Connor, 1987, 62-3; Raw, 1990, 74-5). Bawdy and scientific jargon were removed – leading in some cases to a loss of clarity in the remaining text – and many of the other cuts aimed to streamline the text for performance. More eccentric, and mirroring eighteenth-century practice, was the excision of Dapper and Doll’s set-piece scene in Act 5. Poel also – somewhat anachronistically – added as an epilogue a prayer to the monarch from the mid sixteenth-century play Ralph Roister Doister, which he used in a number of productions (see Morning Post, 12 July 1902; Stage, 17 July 1902).
1903-44: Amateurs and Professionals, UK and USA
Following the 1902 production, the theatrical revival of The Alchemist gradually picked up speed. Perhaps reflecting the widespread reporting of Poel’s activities in the United States, amateur productions began to appear there. On 9 June 1904 The Minneapolis Journal, reporting on the commencement of students from Shattuck School in Faribault, Minnesota, noted that ‘Ben Jonson’s play, “The Alchemist,” was presented this morning at 11 o’clock by the class of ’04 to a large audience. The different parts were cleverly taken and the costuming was admirable’. Further productions followed at Yale University in the 1920s (see New York Times, 24 March 1929), and the New School for Social Research, New York, in June 1931, where it was performed by the Fortune Players and directed by Olga Katzin. The latter featured established Broadway performers such as Maurice Cass (Subtle), J. W. Austin (Face), Viola Roache (Doll), Le Roi Operi (Dapper), Edgar Kent (Drugger), H. H. McCollum (Mammon), and Edgar Barrier (Kastril). It was performed in a quasi-Elizabethan set-up, with a ‘teasingly shallow stage, with apron platform … the more complicated scenes being set up behind the arras’, and the text was ‘most discreetly edited, retaining much of the engaging roughness of Jonsonian comedy’ (Stage, 25 June 1931). J.H. in The New York Times thought that the production had ‘sufficient spirit to keep [the play] at a gait almost unremittingly funny’ and noted that the actors ‘shout its tavern speeches and kick their way to farce; roar and rant and make exits that shake the stage’ (5 June 1931); The New York Post called it ‘a brawling, full-blooded, wholesomely bawdy thing’ (5 June 1931). Cass was praised by J.H. as ‘steadily funny in the broad, the very broad, style of such farce’, but The Stage felt that H. H. McCollum’s ‘shaky interpretation’ of Mammon was a sign of ‘unfortunate’ casting.
The play was more prominent in Britain. Intriguingly, an anonymous review of Donald Wolfit’s production of Volpone at the St James’s Theatre, published in The Stage on 5 March 1942, claims that George Alexander, who had managed the theatre between 1890 and 1918, ‘was a great admirer of Jonson. He was at one time seriously contemplating a revival of “The Alchemist”. Unfortunately he was attracted to the part of Abel Drugger, the “tobacco-man”, on account of the Garrick tradition, but could make nothing of it, and discarded it’. No further evidence for this claim has been traced, and it seems unlikely that Alexander, best-known for his sustained engagement with contemporary drama, would have dabbled in Jonson. The Stage may therefore simply be reflecting the gossip of a generation after Alexander’s death; nonetheless, the possibility of an Alexander revival is intriguing, especially in view of Poel’s stagings and the productions of The Alchemist that did reach the stage in first decades of the twentieth century.
Amateur performances of The Alchemist were mounted by the Soc and Buskin company at Wortley Hall, Finsbury Park, North London, in November 1902 (a new two-act adaptation titled Abel Drugger; see The Stage, 6 November 1902), by Dover County School for Boys in November 1923, and by the Nottingham Philodramatic Society at the Bluecoat School Theatre in December 1940 (see Nottingham Evening Post, 14 December 1940). Better documented than any of these was the all-male revival staged by Cambridge University’s influential Marlowe Society in March 1914. Rejecting Poel’s wholeheartedly antiquarian approach, its scenery consisted ‘largely of hangings and curtains made of a patchwork of bright-coloured stuffs sewed upon canvas. For Subtle’s laboratory there was a futurist backcloth with cubist squares and weird creatures emblematic of alchemy’ (H&S, 9.237). A. E. Housman described the production in a letter to a bedridden A. S. F. Gow:
I am sorry for your affliction, and that you could not come to The Alchemist, which however would have aggravated the symptoms, as laughing is bad for the mumps. … It was very long, and there was a certain amount of repetition, but a great deal that was very amusing, — more amusing now than it can have been in Ben Jonson’s day. The acting too was very good on the whole. I did not think Dennis Robertson really satisfactory as Subtle, and both [Francis Lyall] Birch as Face and [John] Burnaby as Ananias (who was very comic) overacted now and then, and Abel Drugger’s [A. S. C. Goullet’s] voice, which was excellent, was better than his acting: the representative of Sir Epicure Mammon [W. Hedley] seemed to me to act most evenly and to be most like a real person. The widow is a weak and silly element in the play, and was acted by a young man who succeeded in looking like an underbred young woman.
(Housman, 2007, 321-2)
Reviewers noted cuts to the parts of Mammon and Doll Common, which left the latter’s role unclear, and possibly accounts for Housman’s complete failure to mention her; The Cambridge Magazine asked, somewhat plaintively, ‘when will it be possible to play our national drama from the text?’ (3.7 [7 March 1914], 433; see also Cambridge Review 35 [11 March 1914], 367-8; H&S, 9.237).
The Alchemist also began to encroach on the professional stage. The Birmingham Repertory Theatre’s production was planned as early as 1913, when it was mentioned as forthcoming (Times, 17 February 1913; Manchester Courier and Lancashire General Advertiser, 7 March 1913), and it finally appeared under Barry Jackson’s direction on 8 April 1916, with Felix Aylmer as Subtle, Joseph A. Dodd as Face, and Margaret Chatwin as Doll (for the full cast see H&S, 9.237). The cluttered set included a raised inner stage for the alchemist’s lab, backed by orange curtains and featuring a prominent stuffed crocodile; scenes outside Lovewit’s house were played ‘on the apron stage in front of dark drop-curtains’ (The Stage, 13 April 1916; see alsoJensen, 1985, 81). The Stage thought that this staging contributed to the fluidity and unity of the production, which played in under three hours, commenting, that the ‘rapidity and closeness which is in this way introduced into the performance reproduce the vigour and high-spirited fun of the old farce very successfully’.
The Birmingham Post thought that Aylmer garbled his lines, and gave W. J. Rea’s Mammon only qualified praise; it most approved of Stuart Vinden’s Drugger, writing:
Mr. Vinden gave him a clear and childish pink and white, but he drained his face of all intelligence until it had no more expression than a sow’s head in a butcher’s window. Now a spark of low cunning flickered about his eyes; now some petty dissatisfaction drooped the corners of his mouth; now and then the shades of some feeble feeling drifted over his face, darkened its vacancy, and drifted away.
(10 April 1916)
This production was far less extensively cut than its 1914 predecessor, with the main casualties being obscenity, archaic allusion, and jargon; Subtle’s opening line, for instance, became ‘Thy worst. I spit at thee’, and Mammon’s speeches were again condensed (see Jensen, 1985, 82). The Birmingham Post nonetheless concluded that ‘the deletion of some coarse expressions which are reiterated without force’ was necessary, while The Stage complained that ‘though the more obvious coarseness of speech has been eliminated, perhaps Mr. John Drinkwater, in producing this version, might have used his blue pencil even more forcibly without detriment to the humour of the play’ (13 April 1916). In contrast with the academic reviewer at Cambridge, the popular press continued to resist Jacobean bawdry.
Seven years later, in 1923, the Phoenix Society mounted the play at the Regent Theatre, King’s Cross, directed by Allan Wade. Subtle was played by Baliol Holloway, Face by George Desmond, and Doll by Margaret Yarde. The text appears to have been relatively discreetly cut and amended. Ananias’s ‘unpublishable pieties about other men’s hats … received an ovation’ and ‘when the Fairy Queen gave a topical twist to a phrase here and there, every one forgave her’ (Times, 20 March 1923). The reviews suggest a strong ensemble cast, The Times noting that ‘though Mr. Baliol Holloway’s performance missed nothing, there was never a sense of Subtle’s dominating the action’. Yarde, who ‘on one occasion … dropped on all fours and trotted off the stage like a spaniel’, Desmond, and Frank Collier, who played Mammon ‘were, each one of them, playing a lead whenever they spoke, and admirably they played it’ (Martin Armstrong, Spectator, 130 [24 March 1923], 513; Times,20 March 1923). The smaller roles were also striking: Stanley Lathbury was praised for his ‘slow, grating voice, sour expression and admirable economy of movement and gesture’ as Ananias, and Nell Carter, ‘with few words and a country-girl’s giggle, gave a delicately-judged and immensely amusing performance’ as Dame Pliant (Desmond McCarthy, New Statesman, 24 March 1923; Times,20 March 1923). As Jonson’s play was performed with a fuller text, pacing was increasingly becoming a preoccupation; in this case, The Sunday Times thought that the production’s excessive speed ‘was an error on the right side’ (23 March 1923), although Martin Armstrong in The Spectator thought that the pacing was uneven, commenting that ‘the last act did not go with quite the speed and bravura which it requires’.
Cutting and pacing continued to be at stake for two important productions in the 1930s. A 1932 revival at the Malvern Festival drew heavily on the Birmingham Repertory Theatre. Barry Jackson directed and H. K. Ayliff produced; W. J. Rea graduated from Mammon to Subtle, joined by Ralph Richardson as Face. Eileen Beldon was praised for her ‘very engaging vulgarity’ as Doll; Vernon Kelso was hampered by cuts in Mammon’s part, and The Times somewhat equivocally noted that ‘it is difficult to satirize volubility without bringing about the effect of the satirist, but Mr. Kelso did what he could to mitigate it by speech’ (3 August 1932; see also Jensen, 85-6). W. A. Darlington thought that Cedric Hardwicke as Drugger demonstrated ‘how much a really fine actor can do with a tiny part’, and noted his ‘questing forefinger’ and ‘recurrent stammer’ (Daily Telegraph, 3 August 1932); Ivor Brown commented on his ‘bland expectant smile’ and his ‘clown’s tuft of hair and upturned snout’ (Guardian, 3 August 1932). Gesture and facial expression were again, it seems, crucial to Drugger’s theatrical impact, together with carefully designed makeup.
In London three years later, Olga Katzin returned to The Alchemist in a production which appeared first at the Embassy Theatre in March 1935 and transferred to the ‘broader stage and auditorium’ of the Princes Theatre in April (Times, 2 April 1935). There were some adjustments to the cast: Subtle was played by Hugh Miller and Doll by Iris Hoey at both venues, but Barry O’Neill as Face was succeeded by Austin Trevor. Katzin adapted the text into three acts of six scenes; The Stage commented, ‘It may have been pruned down to a certain extent, but most of the essentials of Jonson’s sarcastic onslaughts on cheats and humbugs, whether sham-religious or pseudo-scientific, were retained judiciously, and with great effect’ (14 March 1935). Bagnall Harris’s design was described as ‘wonderfully in the period’ (Stage, 4 April 1935).
Reviewing the performance at the Prince’s Theatre, The Times (2 April 1935) liked Hoey’s ‘rippling fun in the manner of Maria but at expense of all more trivial fools than Malvolio’, while The Stage (4 April 1935) described John Deverill’s performance as Dapper as ‘richly humorous proof that a man can live without brains’. Trevor’s performance as Face drew more attention than O’Neill’s, but its reception was mixed: The Times praised his ‘infinite versatility’, but The Stage thought that his ‘utterance … is too rapid at times’. As this suggests, reviewers were once again preoccupied by pace, one describing the Embassy performance as ‘played in farce-time’ and Cecil Chisholm complaining that the Princes performance ‘screwed the pace up’ and ‘missed the poetry’ as a result (Evening News, 12 March 1935; Sunday Referee, 17 March 1935). Ivor Brown argued that ‘It was right to whip the players into a gallop, but surely more of the poetry might have emerged than actually met the ear’ (Observer, 7 April 1935). Bruce Winston’s Mammon was widely praised for alone having the capacity to make the ‘verbal riches swing in rhythm’ (The Times, 2 April 1935).
1945-59: Consolidation and Experimentation
As a modern performance tradition for The Alchemist began to develop, reviewers began to make comparisons between productions – reviewing the 1923 revival, for instance, The Stage invoked Poel’s treatment of the play – and performances. Certain conventions were also taking shape, such as ensemble performance, swift pacing, and period costume. In this context, Tyrone’s Guthrie’s modern-dress production at the Liverpool Playhouse in April 1945, designed by Tanya Moiseiwitsch, was a bold intervention. Reviewing Katzin’s New York revival, The Stage had commented that The Alchemist ‘proved … so peculiarly timely that one is impatient to see the piece performed in modern dress’ (25 June 1931). However, reviewers do not appear to have been wholly prepared for Guthrie and Moiseiwitsch’s approach. Performed ‘with an obbligato of air raid sirens’, the production featured Eileen Herlie’s Doll ‘in cami-knickers and tin hat; [Noel Willman’s] Subtle, a cross between an over-fed Ghandi and the original Old Moore; and [Peter Glenville’s] Face, a simpering something that should never have sported the Royal Artillery colours’ (R. A. C., Liverpool Echo, 17 April 1945; see also Jensen, 91-2). The Stage’s reviewerthought that it was ‘a production of much power and considerable fascination’, singling out for praise the three leads, Alfie Bass’s Drugger, Olaf Pooley’s Mammon, and Peter Varley’s Ananias, but in contrast with his or her 1930s predecessor believed that ‘it is not easy to reconcile the use of present-day costume with something so far removed from the present in language’ (19 April 1945). Perhaps unsurprisingly, Geoffrey Staines’s production for York Citizens’ Theatre, which toured later in the year, arriving at the King’s Theatre, Hammersmith, in August 1945, appears to have been more conventional. It demonstrated, however, a growing ‘Jonsonian’ tradition among British actors, as Baliol Holloway reprised the role of Subtle, joined by Peter Bennett as Face and Althea Parker as Doll (see Stage, 12 July 1945).
Rejecting both modern and Jacobean dress, the well-received and highly influential revival mounted by the Old Vic company under John Burrell’s direction at the New Theatre, which opened on 14 January 1947, explored a different period altogether. Designed by Maurice Kestelman, the costumes and set were not Jacobean, but eighteenth-century, the programme claiming that the play’s ‘comment on life can apply to any period not excluding our own’ (quoted in A. Williamson, 1948, 205). Despite this assertion, Burrell’s production seems to have sought a middle path between the historicization of period costume and the alienation of modern dress. Intriguingly, however, it retained some topical Jacobean allusions in the dialogue, such as Dame Pliant’s reference to the year of the Spanish Armada, suggesting that its interest in the eighteenth century was no more than skin deep. A ‘composite’ set allowed for a compromise between scene-setting and flexibility of movement; spectators could ‘see at once the street outside the Alchemist’s house, the garden gate, the “privy” in which Dapper was imprisoned, and (by the mere removal of the façade of the house) a staircase, hall, study and a glimpse of the Alchemist’s laboratory (with stuffed crocodile and retorts) within’ (Williamson, 1948, 204). Working within the confines of proscenium arch staging, designers were beginning to formulate considered strategies for dealing with the fluid movement that The Alchemist demands.
Again underlining the development of a sustained performance tradition for The Alchemist, the production featured Ralph Richardson reprising the role of Face, with George Relph as Face, Joyce Redman as Doll Common, Nicholas Hannen as Mammon, and Alec Guinness as Drugger. Reponses to individual performances suggested both the rise of Epicure Mammon, as more of his part was restored, and the enduring appeal of Abel Drugger. Ivor Brownliked Richardson’s look of ‘moon-calf innocence as he gulls and pills lackwit and greedyguts alike’ (Observer, 19 January 1947), and The Times memorably described Hannen’s Mammon as ‘like some great saffron whale sporting in seas of imaginary material bliss’ (15 January 1947). Kenneth Tynan’s is the most evocative of many descriptions of Guinness’s portrayal of Drugger, and merits quoting at length:
I was overjoyed to watch his wistful, happy eyes moving, in dumb wonder from Face to Subtle: a solid little fellow, you felt, and eager to help. At last he puts in a tolerable contribution to the conversation. O altitudo! His face creases ruddily into modest delight, and he stamps his thin feet in glee. In a later scene, Mr. Guinness demonstrates a very rare gift, that of suggesting the change that comes over a man when he is alone. Drugger is commissioned by Face to bring him a Spanish costume as disguise. He trots away, and returns shyly, clad in its showy cloak and hat. Waiting for Face to answer the door, he begins to execute timid dance-steps under the porch. He treads a rapt, self-absorbed measure with himself, consumed with joy. Then Face appears: the pretence is over, he recognises his intellectual master, and, not regretfully or pathetically, but smartly and prosaically, he sheds his costume and hands it over. It is most touchingly done.
(Tynan, 1950, 94)
Tynan captures here not only the way in which the non-verbal elements of performance can coalesce, but also the sheer pleasure that watching an intelligent actor submerge himself into the role of Drugger affords. However, although his success in the role mirrored Garrick’s this was not a return to the tobacconist’s domination of The Alchemist. Although Hannen and Guinness especially were singled out, the general impression is of an ensemble production that was fast-moving and knock-about but did not sacrifice clarity or poetry. The Manchester Guardian noted the ‘dangerous speed’ (23 January 1947), while The Stage wrote that the characters ‘fall over each other and about the stage like ninepins … the players generally are treated with affronts to their physical dignity that must be uncommon in the recent experience of these ornaments of our stage’ (16 January 1947). Brown thought that ‘the “Old Vic” team cut a little and gabble much and the method is wholly effective’ (Observer, 19 January 1947). The production also restored an in-joke from the original text, when Guinness’s Drugger asked ‘Did you never see me play the fool’; the Old Vic’s immediately preceding production, King Lear, in which Guinness indeed played the Fool, had closed only on 4 January (see Williamson, 1948, 204).
Although it reverted to Jacobean dress, the next production of The Alchemist was more iconoclastic than its relatively polite predecessor. Staged by the New York City Theatre Company in May 1948, directed by Morton da Costa and designed by Herbert Brodkin, it featured George Coulouris as Subtle, José Ferrer, the company’s general director, as Face, and Nan McFarland as Doll. The revival was described by one reviewer as ‘an Elizabethan Hellzapoppin’ (R. R., New York World-Telegram, 7 May 1948), and by da Costa as ‘an Elizabethan Room Service’ (Alan Branigan, Newark Evening News, 7 May 1948). These allusions to a harum-scarum 1938 musical, adapted for the screen in 1941, and a 1937 play, filmed with the Marx Brothers in 1939, underline the perceived connection between The Alchemist and contemporary farce, and tell us much about the approach to the text. The play was abridged, with a new explanatory prologue sequence (see Carter, 1972, 30); it appears to have been taken at a helter-skelter pace, with plenty of physical business. The effect is summarised in a review by John S. Wilson: ‘The emphasis is on action, action at almost any cost, whether it is Mr. Ferrer’s frequent scamperings upstairs with his stockings drooping over his ankles, his almost equally frequent entrance through a fireplace or, when those two have been worn to a rub, Ezra Stone [as Mammon] sliding downstairs on his stomach’ (PM, 9 May 1948). As Ejner J. Jensen notes, the production appears to have been dominated by Subtle and Face (1985, 91), and reviewers generally focused on the on-stage relationship between Ferrer and Coulouris, Bob Francis making the perceptive observation that Coulouris ‘plays with a heavier hand and the contrast sharpens the effect of their work together’ (Billboard, 15 May 1948).
A cluster of British productions in the 1950s suggest the impact of the Old Vic revival but also the long shadow that it cast. Two were student productions, one at Cambridge University in 1950, the other at Birkbeck College, London, in 1958 (See Times, 30 November 1950 and 6 March 1958). The Cambridge revival featured future luminaries John Barton as Face and Julian Slade as Subtle; in David King’s performance as Mammon, The Times wrote, ‘the Renaissance breaks the petty dam in which the producers have designed to hold it and bursts in a flood of dazzling words’ (30 November 1950). At Ipswich in 1956, The Stage thought that the endeavours of Gordon Gostelow as Subtle and David Waller as Face ‘must be almost as exhausting as they are amusing’ and that Val May’s production was ‘a technical triumph, to say the least, in spite of a somewhat over-zealous effects department’ (24 May).
Better known are the revivals of the Bristol Old Vic (1952), Theatre Workshop (1953) and the Birmingham Repertory Company (1957), each of which displayed a different approach to the text. The Bristol production, directed by Dennis Carey, was a pacy and heavily cut version, ‘full of comic invention and with each rise and fall of the curtain accompanied by horseplay’ (Stage, 4 December 1952). The proscenium arch format was again being twisted to serve a production’s conception of Jonson’s dramaturgy. Dennis Bushell described his favourite performances in striking terms:
a rapid series of swiftly established, vivid impressions – the dancing, black wisp with a chuckle like crackling paper that James Cairncross makes of Subtle; the Cockney cunning of John Neville’s Face; Robert Cartland, puffed out with plum-coloured velvet and cutting an absurd caper as Sir Epicure Mammon; the “smock rampant” Pauline Jameson makes of Doll Common; and the palsied crow – or a spectre from St. Trinian’s cupboard, if you like – that Peter Nicholls conjures out of the sable-clad Ananias.
(Bristol Evening World, 12 December 1952)
At Birmingham, The Alchemist was directed by Bernard Hepton and designed by Paul Shelving, featured Albert Finney as Face, Kenneth MacKintosh as Subtle, Audrey Noble as Doll, and Arthur Pentelow as Mammon. Set in the eighteenth century, the production used a small revolving stage and included a piece of business in which an actor had ‘smoke pouring from a funnel on the top of his head’ (London Illustrated News, 231 [1957], 806; W. H. W., Birmingham Evening Mail, 23 October 1957). The Stage thought that the use of the revolving stage meant that ‘Scene turns to scene with impetuous haste and the company is caught up with the whirligig of speed. It affects their enunciation and sets their timing awry, so that the play loses its form … In some ways the production comes very near to success, only to fall away precipitately time and again’ (24 October 1957).
More iconoclastic than either of these productions was Joan Littlewood’s revival for Theatre Workshop, performed at the Theatre Royal in Stratford, East London, in 1953. As the interview quoted in the introduction to this essay suggests, Littlewood had a strong sense of what she wanted from Jonson, and this impulse was shared by the company that she headed. ‘We want’, declares Theatre Workshop’s Manifesto, ‘a theatre with a living language, a theatre which is not afraid of the sound of its own voice and which will comment as fearlessly on Society as did Ben Jonson and Aristophanes’ (Goorney, 1981, 42). Rather than worrying about Jonson’s satiric edge, as had eighteenth-century critics, Theatre Workshop embraced it. The production was billed as ‘a comedy of spivs and their victims’, surprising The Stage, which commented somewhat sniffily that while the company’s ‘rumbustious knock-about’ ‘cuts right across the spirit of a play by Shakespeare, Molière, Shaw or O’Casey … Ben Jonson thrives on this treatment’ (5 November 1953). While thinking the set ‘uninterestingly square and stolid’ it praised the ‘zestful’ playing of Howard Goorney as Subtle, Harry H. Corbett as Face, Avis Burnage as Doll, George Cooper as Mammon, George Luscombe as Drugger, and Joby Blanshard as Tribulation. A review in The Stratford Express is more helpful in its detail, describing the way in which the opening put the narrative into context: ‘With the cry of “Bring out your dead” ringing out we see the alchemist at his work’ and the ‘upper room where a curtained four-poster occupies so prominent a place’ (30 October 1953). The reviewer was particularly pleased by the ‘immaculate performance’ of Cooper, ‘an ancient knight, fat, asthmatical and lecherous’, who was carried on in a sedan chair (Littlewood, 1994, 450), and commented that the production was ‘given such a warm welcome that the curtain call Mr. Harry Corbett was moved to exclaim with evident relief, “Thank goodness you have enjoyed it”’. (For further discussion see Schafer, 1999a, 162.)
1960-72: Cultures and Counter Cultures
In the years following the Second World War, The Alchemist had become established as a viable theatrical property, even if productions were still often greeted by reviewers as precious rarities. Moreover, if a mainstream performance tradition was becoming increasingly well established – farcical but not too farcical; ensemble in style, but with room for individual actors to periodically take the limelight; discreetly cut and tastefully staged – the productions of Guthrie, da Costa, and Littlewood suggested ways in which such a tradition might be challenged. During the tumultuous period of the 1960s and early 70s, these tensions heightened. While it became a cliché to assert that The Alchemist was still relevant to a modern society in thrall to various trends and scams, new developments in performance style and theatrical form also began to pose challenges for the play.
The 1960s’ first significant revival of The Alchemist took place at the Citizens’ Theatre, Glasgow, directed by Peter Duguid and designed by David Jones. Ken Wynne’s Subtle, ‘a lean and hungry rogue, most impressive in his sham doctor’s gown and with the rigmarole of “projection” on his lips’, and Bernard Kay’s Face, ‘a very smooth costumer indeed, whose resemblance when bearded to Honest Abe himself is no doubt to put the better face upon it’, were ‘completed with gusto’ by Una Maclean’s Doll (Christopher Small, Glasgow Herald, 23 February 1960). Small was especially taken with Martin Heller’s ‘well stuffed and padded’ Mammon and Russell Hunter’s Ananias, ‘with a face like an embittered gargoyle and bearing with him an odour of sanctity you could, as the saying goes, cut with a knife’. He thought, however, that the chilly period décor and costume, ‘all done … in pale ghostly hues’, were at odds with the production’s ‘animal warmth’ (see also Stage, 3 March 1960).
The increasingly secure place of The Alchemist as a play for the stage was underlined by a sell-out production mounted by the Oregon Shakespeare Festival in 1961 (for a detailed account, on which I draw here, see Carter, 1972, 61-8). Directed by Edward S. Brubaker in a replica of the Fortune playhouse, it used minimal sets and pseudo-Elizabethan costumes, and was hailed by reviewers as a shining example of ensemble playing. As James Cunningham Carter notes, cuts were made to jargon and exposition, but there was ‘no cutting on moral or religious grounds’ (1972, 63), and the production took full advantage of the farcical possibilities of this relatively full text: actors ‘took pratfalls, walked into walls, did double takes, leered at bosoms, made off-color puns, and gestured and postured with roguish abandon’ (Medford Mail Tribune, 22 August 1961). Leonora Offord writes of Nagle Jackson, who played Face, that ‘nobody on earth can make a bawdy point more deftly than he, and his pantomime extends even to his feet, which stay in character and make their own comment’ (Ashland Daily Tidings, 22 August 1961). The explosion in the laboratory was particularly effective: ‘In clouds of smoke and a blasting sound, diagrams fell off the wall, furniture overturned, ornaments teetered and swayed and actors were thrown to the stage’ (Medford Mail Tribune, 22 August 1961).
In contrast with the period settings used at Glasgow and Ashland, when Tyrone Guthrie and Tanya Moiseiwitsch returned to The Alchemist at the Old Vic in 1962 they kept their faith in modern dress, building on the iconoclastic impact of their earlier production. Lee Montague’s Face, wrote The Times, ‘relies mainly on a captain’s uniform and a Flying Officer Kyte manner which mightily impresses his less sophisticated victims; Subtle [Leo McKern] performs a variety of quick changes, including mortarboard and gown, and a fakir outfit; and Dol [Priscilla Morgan] appears by turns as a parlourmaid, nurse, and bespangled courtesan, relapsing when off duty into a pair of baby-doll pyjamas’ (29 November 1962). These descriptions suggest the production’s tangled web of influences, including as they do Flying Officer Kyte – a character from the popular BBC radio comedy It’s That Man Again – a range of social and cultural stereotypes, and an eclectic mixture of clothing. The project of updating The Alchemist was also reflected in the text, where archaic references were strategically modernised: for instance, ‘Crackers in a puppet play’ became ‘squibs on the 5th of November’, the plague was transformed into the flu, and when Ananias declared himself ‘A faithful brother’ Surly asked ‘What’s that? A Buchmanite? Jehovah’s Witness? Mormon?’ (Jensen, 1985, 94). It was not, however, an expurgated text. Guthrie’s handing of the grittier aspects of the text and his manipulation of tone are both suggested by the contrasting moments in the opening scene, in which Subtle ‘pursue[d] Face over the stage flicking him with the contents of a brimming chamber pot’ and Doll made her entrance ‘to Tchaikovsky’s Flower Waltz played on a wheezy hand-held gramophone’ (Times, 29 November 1962; John Rosselli, Guardian, 29 November 1962).
Reviewers were divided. The Stage offered some practical benefits of modern dress: ‘Differences of class and occupation are immediately clear, while the exorbitant number of disguises are obvious to a modern audience in a way that would scarcely have been possible in an orthodox production, where each change would just mean another item of fancy dress’ (6 December 1962). For The Times, modern dress ‘underlines the fact that the establishment – in its double capacity as astrological clip-joint and brothel – is a house of illusions … What Guthrie has done is to release the energy of this marvellously constructed work into the modern world in which the con men and greedy dupes of Jonson’s time still flourish as vigorously as ever’ (29 November 1962). Kenneth Tynan too thought the production faithful to ‘the shape and spirit of Jonson’s play’, and he compared it favourably with Burrell’s Old Vic production (Observer,2 December 1962). Elsewhere, however, Bamber Gascoigne complained about Guthrie’s ‘almost idiotic idea of what makes drama seem “relevant” to a modern audience’ and Bernard Levin declared, ‘If I were a younger man I would go down to the Waterloo Road and thrash Sir Tyrone Guthrie to within an inch of his life’ (Spectator, 7 December 1962; Daily Mail, 29 November 1962). What one reviewer found imaginative and engaging, another merely found alienating.
The Stage suggested that touch and gesture were at the production’s heart: ‘fingers that juggle chamber pots and which grope, stray and wander, or take on a rudely unmistakable meaning to underline an obscenity, are the basis of [Guthrie’s] portrait’ (6 December 1962). Among individual performances, Charles Gray’s Mammon was praised as ‘a gorgeous, wheezing, likeably lascivious creation somewhere between Oscar Wilde and Margaret Rutherford’ (D. H., Bristol Evening Post, 29 November 1962), and David William’s Ananias, described by Alan Brien as having ‘all the pathetic eccentricity of a ruined umbrella’ (Sunday Telegraph, 2 December 1962), garnered that character a good deal of attention. Tribulation was played by a woman, Catherine Lacey, in an early acknowledgement that the play’s parts for women are limited, and one that would be imitated in later years; ‘one realises’, commented J. C. Trewin, ‘that, at heart, she expects to be Mistress of Ceremonies on Judgment Day’ (Birmingham Post, 5 December 1962).
A steady stream of productions followed. Another modern-dress revival, at the Cleveland Playhouse in 1963, used a different strategy to Guthrie’s in updating the text, focusing not just on contemporary allusion but also on common words and grammar. As Jensen describes, ‘Marry becomes why, and ere becomes before. Thou dost not know? Is transformed into You don’t think so?’ (1985, 97). In the following year, a production at the Gate Theater, New York, was rather less iconoclastic. Directed by Stephen Porter and featuring Roy Schneider as Face, John Heffernan as Subtle, and Carole Macho as Doll, its cast attacked ‘the lines and the business at a break-neck pace and an almost uninflected fortissimo’ (Howard Taubman, New York Times, 15 September 1964), with a vigour that almost overwhelmed the small theatre. Nonetheless, Taubman thought that Porter had ‘a lively, valid notion of the play’s robust intelligence’, and another reviewer thought that ‘Jonson’s motley, malevolent characters [were] given the full-flavoured individuality each deserves’ (Norman Nadel, New York World-Telegraph and Sun, 15 September 1964).
In February 1965 the play appeared at the Oxford Playhouse and on tour, in a period-costume revival directed by Frank Hauser and designed by Michael Clarke, with John Turner as Face, Alan MacNaughtan as Subtle, Judi Dench as Doll, David Swift as Mammon, and Simon Ward as Drugger. A number of reviewers drew comparisons between this production and Guthrie’s three years earlier, one commenting pointedly that Hauser ‘makes it abundantly clear, in his direction, that he does not share Tyrone Guthrie’s view … that Jonson is unintelligible to a twentieth-century audience without the adventitious aid of modern dress’ (Stage, 21 January 1965). In addition to using period costume, Hauser put an unusually strong degree of faith in Jonson’s text. The Stage noted, approvingly, that ‘Mr. Hauser also refrains, unlike Sir Tyrone, from the impiousness of actually re-writing Jonson’s text, and flatters his audience with possessing the intelligence to understand Jonson and let him speak in his own voice’. Hauser cut strategically, kept the action moving, and took advantage of Clarke’s set, with its staircase and three entrances; his production appears to have stressed realism, and to have sought humour in dialogue rather than slapstick.
Derick Grigs drew a perceptive comparison with the Old Vic production two decades earlier: ‘With an all-star cast, the Old Vic used Jonson’s comedy of humours as an excuse for a dazzling parade of timeless comic types … With a cast ranging from brilliant to competent, Mr. Hauser played down the caricature in favour of detailed, realistic characterisation that stressed the similarity to types of our own day’ (Plays and Players, 12 [1965], 42). He also offered some vibrant sketches of Turner’s ‘Tirelessly jaunty and boisterous’ Face, who ‘could have been a barrow boy who had learnt to talk posh in service’, MacNaughtan’s ‘grey-haired Subtle … more of the professional con man with a long prison record and a wide choice of instant personalities to mask his mean, cruel face’, and Dench’s Doll, ‘hard sensuality offsetting the coy eccentricity she assumed for the benefit of Sir Epicure Mammon’. Theatre World was struck by the moment at which an enraged Doll snatched off her golden wig and stamped on it, revealing short hair underneath (61 [1965], 35). There was also praise for Zia Mohyeddin’s ‘Oxonian insolence’ as Surly, and Julian Curry’s Ananias, ‘booming like a doom-bearing bittern’ (Plays and Players; Stage). In a neat in-joke, the Playhouse’s former director, Frank Shelley, played Lovewit, his return to his former ‘home’ lending his performance additional authority. In spite of their generally positive reactions to the production, reviewers’ comments nonetheless suggest that a certain tension was lacking. Robert Levens thought that ‘some loss of farcical tension results from allowing clients access to the house by an off-stage back door’ (The Oxford Magazine, 21 January 1965, 166-7), and the central relationship between Face and Subtle was thought by many to be insufficiently developed, Ian Donaldson noting that the ‘feeling of continual civil war between them is missing’ (Guardian, 20 January 1965).
Hauser’s production was careful – perhaps too careful – in its approach to the text, and its emphasis on realism and the spoken word. In contrast, three productions in the following years were all thought to put too little trust in the text, instead smothering it with exaggerated comic business. Reviewing Jules Irving’s production, staged in Jacobean costume at the Vivian Beaumont Theatre in the Lincoln Center, New York, in October 1966, Walter Kerr complained that ‘everything – or nearly everything … is unmistakably physical, external, whacked at from the outside’ (New York Times, 14 October 1966). Robert Brustein summed up the effect:
Points which should be made through character are made though the use of expensive props: a huge steam-rolling machine, with a female figurehead, is pumped for laughs whenever the action flags; the costumes, though handsome, do not look as if they had ever been worn by human beings; and none of the actors manages to make a vivid impression on his part.
(New Republic, 29 October 1966)
Other critics thought that actors did manage to make a ‘vivid impression’, but these impressions were generally negative. In Newsweek, Richard Gilman complained that Michael O’Sullivan turned Subtle ‘into a grotesque made out of Sillly Putty. Shaping his features into a hundred unrelated grimaces … he manages to put out the play’s comic fire in his frantic attempts to fan it’ (24 October 1966). George Rochberg, who composed the production’s music, offered an alternative perspective on the production’s failure, writing to Istvan Anhalt after seeing the first preview,
It is not bold enough nor intuitive enough. The director lost his nerve somewhere along the line and stuck too close to cliché-conventions for me, working too thinly for another. All of this of course relates too to his fear of really using the music. He insists the actors must be heard. I don’t deny this. But there are places where their gestures & movements animated by the musical environment I tried to create would come across with more point and vigor than relying on what they say. The fact that the music is on tape means of course that by a mere turn of the dial you can negate the presence & therefore value, dramatically, of the music – or enhance the play by letting it rise to hard-edge audibility & give the whole scene color & life.
(Gillmor, 2007, 43)
Where reviewers complained about exaggerated performance style and over-reliance on visuals and props, Rochberg argues that Irving should have pushed harder to find a new and more effective balance between dialogue, gesture, and sound.
Similar problems were identified in a revival by Toronto Workshop Productions at Alexander Street, Toronto, in February 1968. The production was directed by George Luscombe, a veteran of Littlewood’s Theatre Workshop production a decade earlier, but it took a rather difference approach. The set, designed by Nancy Jowsey, was ‘a platform with an open cellar, supporting some narrow stairways and a second level’, and it was criticised by one reviewer for restricting ‘the free flow of action, which becomes ingrown and cramped’ (Jensen, 1985, 101; Martin Stone, Canadian Tribune, 4 March 1968). The revival was also criticised for substituting for the text ‘a large measure of what Jonson’s rival called inexplicable dumb shows and noise’ (Toronto Telegram, 16 February 1968). Luscombe’s company were known for their innovations in contemporary Canadian drama and for their experimental approach to staging. As Delia D’Ermo writes, ‘in TWP’s tradition of total theatre, language was no more than a part of the whole dramatic experience including sets, movement, music, lights and sound’ (1993, 89). In this context, their period-dress production of The Alchemist appeared to some to represent a loss of nerve or a missed opportunity. Stone commented they had ‘never before stood in awe of a script … Surely it would be no disrespect for Jonson’s theme, no compromise with Workshop’s integrity, to look at The Alchemist through modern lenses’ (Canadian Tribune, 4 March 1968). The production appears to have been unhappy for most of those involved; it was withdrawn after three weeks, most of the company left, and Luscombe himself was almost bankrupted (see D’Ermo, 1993, 88; Carson, 1995, 91).
The third production, by the Minnesota Theatre Company at the Crawford Livingstone Theatre, St Paul, in April 1969, directed by Mel Shapiro, balanced John Jensen’s eclectic range of costumes – including ‘a silly guru toga, some inappropriate police uniforms whose style is Chicago 68, and totally traditional Anabaptist frocks’, ‘some jerkins, hose and codpieces, a cycle jacket, costumes suggesting hippies and Indian gurus, and others vaguely suggesting Russian nobility in a heavy winter’ – against a rock music soundtrack (Peter Altman, Minneapolis Star, 29 April 1969; John H. Harvey, St Paul Dispatch, 14 April 1969). Costumes and staging seem at times actually to have restricted the performers. Charles Stone in The Minnesota Daily complained that the ‘drab and mountainous Siberian overcoat’ worn by Allen Hamilton as Mammon ‘muffles his every word’; his great speech in 2.2 ‘provokes the diversion of another light show with accompanying guitars’, and he seduced Doll Common ‘in an outlandish bathtub from which his freedom of movement is disastrously restricted’ (18 April 1969). Among the performances, the most successful appear to have been Emery Battis’s Tribulation, played ‘as if he were one step away from the commedia dell’arte’ and John Ramsey’s Surly, whose ‘caricature Spaniard … was a minor triumph in the play’s second half’ (Stone, Minnesota Daily, 18 April 1969; Jensen, 1985, 102). Even a more positive review described this as ‘more an escapade than a revival’ (John K. Sherman, Minneapolis Star, 14 April 1969).
As the 1960s drew to a close, performances of The Alchemist had developed a tendency to veer between a series of opposing poles: textual fidelity versus adaptation; period-dress versus modern-dress; realism versus exaggeration. Two well-received productions of 1969, both praised for their assumed fidelity to Jonson’s intentions and both staged in period costume, took divergent approaches in relation to performance style. Jean Gascon’s inventive production for the Stratford Festival, Ontario, designed by James Hart Stearns, featured ‘huge blood-red hangings at all the entrances, scruffy velvets, and torn lace’, incongruously juxtaposed with a ‘space-age machine for conjuring up the philosopher’s stone’, which ‘blew up into a nightmare, fusty green mould, smoking and belching bilious smoke all over the auditorium’ (Gordon Jocelyn, Gazette, Montreal, 12 June 1969). Reviewers identified ‘sight gags’, ‘bold, bawdy gestures’, and contraptions that recalled the complex gadgets depicted by the cartoonist and inventor Rube Goldberg (Lewis Funke, New York Times, 12 June 1969); suited to the visual dissonance was Gabriel Charpentier’s music for organ and percussion, ‘opening with something that sounded like Bach’s great fugue, and moving into a sour concatenation, with all the stops pulled out when the inevitable day of reckoning arrived’ (Jocelyn, Gazette, 12 June 1969). The production appeared to most commentators to fall just on the right side of farcical excess.
Aural discord and exaggerated décor was coupled with bold performances. Reviewing it on tour at the Studebaker Theater in Chicago, William Leonard wrote, ‘The Stratfordians play it in kick-of-the-pants style, leering and mugging, racing feverishly in and out of disguise, shouting and tumbling’ but suggested that they nonetheless maintained a kind of frenzied sincerity (Chicago Tribune, 5 March 1969; on the treatment of tone in this production see also Schafer and Cox, 2013). Reviewers generally liked Powys Thomas as Subtle and Bernard Behrens as Face, and Jocelyncommented on one striking interpolation by Jane Casson’s Doll: the ‘tantalizing pronunciation of Ole like an English command, “O, lay.”’ (Gazette, 12 June 1969). However, William Hutt’s robust, red-nosed Mammon appears to have been the stand-out performance. Something of its effect is captured in an extended account by Walter Kerr:
He is a child counting blessings, chortling not over the blessings themselves but over the ascending and perhaps infinite number of them, an appetite that is beyond reason but that grows happier with itself as it exceeds reason and even possibility in size. Eventually he is jumping up and down with glee, pounding his feet against the floor in an ecstasy of sheer excessiveness … Mr. Hutt’s management of this wild man is magnificent, and it has got that way because Mr. Hutt pays such close attention to articles and conjunctions.
(New York Times, 22 June 1969)
For this commentator, attention to verbal detail provided the foundation for physical expression. However, as Elizabeth Schafer and Emma Cox point out, Hutt’s performance also divided reviewers, some finding grotesque excess while others found a more delicately poised physicality (Schafer and Cox, 2013).
In contrast with the joyous excess of Gascon’s production, Stuart Burge’s revival at the Nottingham Playhouse, also seen at the Old Vic in London for a few performances in early 1970, was firmly anchored in realism. Trevor Pitt’s naturalistic design for ‘a revolving house crammed with doors and spy-holes, cramped passages and stairways’ (Irving Wardle, Times, 10 February 1970) was praised by Emrys Bryson as ‘so ingeniously real – inside and out – that the playhouse should pay rates on it’ (Nottingham Evening Post, 2 October 1969). David Dodimead appeared as Subtle, ‘swirling … his astrologer’s robes or staggering around in guru-like rags’ (The Stage, 16 October 1969), accompanied by Peter Whitbread as Face and Cherith Mellor as Doll. Wardle noted a series of effective moments:
when the three cheats are interrupted in the midst of gulling the blindfolded Dapper [Trevor T. Smith], they keep him spinning like a top as they dash about to attend to their other victims … the unwinding of Abel [Donald Gee] from an endless piece of damask … the trick swordplay of Kastril [Nicholas Clay] … the pause that descends on the assembled company at the voice of Dapper – the forgotten man in the privy.
He thought, however, that some opportunities in Jonson’s text were overlooked: ‘the explosion of the “project” following Sir Epicure’s assault on Dol is a good joke but it should be thunderously crowned by Subtle’s Isaiah-like curse on the wickedness of his client. Here we get multiple flashes and bangs, but the curse is merely thrown off as a subordinate line’ (Times, 11 February 1970).
Frank Middlemass’s grubby Mammon, ‘boney legs aquiver at the prospect of wheeling in pewter and wheeling out gold’ (Stage, 16 October), in some respects epitomized the production and some of the divergent reactions it produced. He was lauded by Gareth Lloyd Evans as a ‘teeth-sucking, head-lurching, leg-raising portrait of aged and hopeless lust [which] is not only superbly comic but truly Jonsonian’ but disparaged by J. C. Trewin, reviewing the London transfer, as ‘a senile sensualist’ (Manchester Weekly Guardian, 11 October 1969; Birmingham Post, 10 February 1970). Similarly, where one reviewer saw in the London performances ‘a pungent and very topical satire’, another instead saw something ‘sordid, decaying, and grubby … you can almost smell the latrines’ (Martin Esslin, Plays and Players, April 1970, 44; Sunday Times, 15 February 1970).
Reviewing Burge’s production, The Illustrated London News described The Alchemist as ‘a comedy in fashion now’ (256.1 [1970], 26). The truth of this statement in Britain at least is underlined by the appearance of two new productions in 1970 and a further one in 1972. These productions highlight the continuing development of conventions for staging The Alchemist but also new challenges to those conventions. The staging of Richard Cottrell’s revival for the Cambridge Theatre Company at the Cambridge Arts Theatre, appears to have resembled Burge’s in some respects, Keith Norman’s set having ‘as many doors and staircases as for a bedroom farce’ (M. M. A. M., Stage, 12 February 1970). However, as Jensen remarks, it appeared ‘sanitized and deodorized’ in comparison with Burge’s production (1985, 107). James Bolam played Face, John Nettleton was Subtle and Jan Waters was ‘actually desirable’ as Doll (Sunday Times, 15 February 1970). The Stage was impressed by Nettleton, ‘half-hypnotised by his own superficial science, grasping after a vanishing youth transforming itself into a bleak old age’, but thought that the pacing was off: ‘the first half of this production was nearer a dull bruise than a rapier thrust’.
The second production of 1970, at the Chichester Festival, faced a number of setbacks before it even reached the stage. Laurence Harvey, who was due to play Face, fell in rehearsal and broke his leg, and his replacement, James Booth, was unable to learn the part before the revival opened; Face was therefore played in early performances by the director, Peter Dews. The production opened with a divided prologue, spoken by Face and Lovewit, which showed Lovewit leaving his house to the mercies of Face, ‘Subtle [Edward Atienza] busily installing his alchemist’s equipment and Dol [Dora Bryan] arriving by cart to sample the bed and the privy’ (Irving Wardle, Times, 23 July 1970). This opening suggested a desire to make the narrative clear to spectators, but the production that followed it was heavily criticised by some reviewers for refusing to take the play seriously; for Wardle, it was ‘a vaudeville version which omits the element of danger’, while Felix Barker complained that The Alchemist ‘should not be played as farce’ (Evening News, 23 July 1970). The Stage thought – in contrast – that Jonson’s comedy ‘is essentially a farce’ but mourned the ‘pungent verbal satire’ which it thought had been lost; however, it made an effort to take the production on its own terms, praising Atienza’s ‘remarkable facial resources’ and commenting, ‘His pasty, dead-pan face and his dry, at times fierce, delivery have something of the circus clown about them, and are none the worse for that’. William Hutt, reprising the role of Mammon, was ‘about the only member of the company to project comedy by words alone’ (A. M., Stage, 30 July 1970).
Perhaps the most radical production in this period of experiments was Frank Dunlop’s 1972 production at the Young Vic, designed by Nadine Baylis, which opened at the Vienna Festival and later toured in the United States and Canada. A decade after Guthrie’s version had outraged the likes of Bernard Levin, Dunlop again favoured overt modernisation of the text. Officially billed as an ‘entertainment mainly by Ben Jonson’, the production updated the play’s topical allusions, ‘transporting the whirligig plot to a world of Chelsea terraces, slippery PR men, Salvation Army bands … phoney gurus, and obsessive gamblers, up from the suburbs, dreaming of ecstasy on the Costa Brava’ (Charles Lewsen, Times, 9 June 1972; Benedict Nightingale, New Statesman, 16 June 1972). In one striking emendation, Subtle described how he had rescued Face not from ‘Pie-corner’ by from ‘the Golden Egg, where you was working as a washer-up’ (New Statesman, 16 June 1972). In The Stage, M. M. thought that the effect was mixed: ‘The interpolated asides were hilariously funny at the moment of hearing but curdled like an ill-blended mayonnaise on contact with blank verse’ (15 June 1972).
As Subtle, Ian Trigger was ‘anything but’ subtle, ‘karate-chopping down his rivals to size, perching on a table in saffron robes and flower bells, like a sort of hippy budgerigar, or friar-smocked’ (Stage, 15 June 1972). An ‘almost insolently relaxed’ Nigel Hawthorne played Face, and Denise Coffey was Doll, ‘very funny, whether bulge-bellied in a purple bikini or diamanté-winged as the Queen Faery’ (Lewson, Times, 9 June 1972; Stage, 15 June 1972). The gulls were striking but some reviewers thought that, like the interpolations, their effect tailed off, perhaps because at least some of the interpretations seemed forced. Nonetheless, The Stage praised Paul Brook’s Mammon, ‘with the figure of a cream puff, an A.C./D.C. attitude to sex and a voice like candy floss’, and Gavin Reed’s Surly, in purple suit and chestnut-coloured shoes, a ‘languid frequenter of all the gay pubs, galvanised into a flurry of activity only by the prospect of female nudity, the activity being all of a back-tracking nature’ (15 June 1972). The audience sighed with Andrew Robertson’s Drugger as he dropped a bunch of rejected flowers into a dustbin. The Stage thought that Julia McCarthy and Joan Heel, playing Ananias and Tribulation as a pair of Salvation Army majors, ‘deserved their laughs’ (Stage, 15 June 1972). However, Lewson’s complaint in The Times that ‘Salvation Army lasses are not Anabaptists’ (9 June 1972) draws attention to the problem of modernising Jonson’s satire: updating the play to a new time-period is only as effective as the parallels that it creates, and it only takes one or two clashing details for at least some spectators to refuse to go along with the ride.
1977-1989: Intimacy and the Postmodern Alchemist
After the experiments of the 1960s and early 1970s, the next move was, in its own way, to take The Alchemist back to basics. Despite its 1960s revivals of The Revenger’s Tragedy, Women Beware Women, Doctor Faustus and Bartholomew Fair, the Royal Shakespeare Company had never taken on The Alchemist. This was to change in May 1977, when Trevor Nunn directed the play at The Other Place, Stratford-upon-Avon, with designs by Chris Dyer. The production transferred to the RSC’s London home, the Aldwych Theatre, the following December. (See the Performance Database for images from this production.) The script was adapted by the playwright Peter Barnes, who had had also worked on the text for Burge’s production in 1969. John Woodvine played Subtle, Ian McKellen Face, and Susan Drury Doll. The Jacobean realism of the production recalled the grittiness of Littlewood and Burge’s revivals. Performances opened with the sound of hawkers’ cries which segued into calls of ‘bring out your dead’, a baited mousetrap appeared on the edge of the stage, and the conspirators made their first entrance in their underwear (Mallin, 2007, 114; Cave, 1999, 49). Reviewing it at The Other Place – the RSC’s tiny studio theatre – Irving Wardle commented on the ‘physical staging’, noting that
This is Jonson played at top speed and point-blank range on a diminutive trick set by Chris Dyer mined with traps, galleries, stairways and spy-holes. Part frowsty thieves’ kitchen, part theatrical changing-room, it supplies the actors with a trampoline for the play’s main comic idea: namely, the god-like transformation that Jonson’s three seedy crooks undergo whenever they shed their own characters and stage another masquerade.
(Times, 24 May 1977)
While Wardle approved of the set’s claustrophobic effect, Michael Billington thought that it ‘looked physically cramped’ and was far more positive about the production on its transfer to the larger Aldwych, which he described as ‘Jonson played with the right delirium’ (Guardian, 15 December 1977; see also Guardian, 24 May 1977). Relatively small changes were made to the text (Mallin, 2007, 112-14), although the results were savagely criticised by Bernard Levin – again taking up cudgels on Jonson’s behalf – who described the perpetrators as ‘Barnes the Booby and Nunn the Noodle’ (Sunday Times, 18 December 1977).
Attention was paid to small details delineating the relationships between characters; Face and Subtle, for instance, ‘trust each other so little that each carries his own key to the double-locked petty cash box’ (Guardian, 15 December 1977). Richard Cave describes the ‘heart-stopping precariousness about it all, which manifested itself in an increasing panic on the part of the gulls as if – deep down – they sensed they were to be baulked of their goals, and in a delirious excitability in the tricksters (Face especially) at what they were nerving themselves to do, as if they were awed by their own audacity’ (Cave, 1991, 92). In a striking stage image at the conclusion, McKellen’s Face was ‘left grinning balefully at the house, coins trickling through his fingers, as the lights fade’ (Wardle, Times, 24 May 1977). Careful attention to the play’s ending was to become a feature of productions over the next thirty years.
The transfer of Nunn’s production to the Aldwych overshadowed another revival at the Nottingham Playhouse in late January 1978, directed by Richard Eyre and designed by Pamela Howard. The production was set in Dickensian London, and emphasised physical comedy: there were ‘running gag[s] of doors slammed in faces’ and Ken Campbell’s Subtle was ‘spotted before one of his entrances seated on a privy’ (Ned Chaillet, Times, 1 February 1978). In a highly critical review, Rosalind Miles described the production as an attempt to capitalise on the success of Eyre and Campbell’s revival of Bartholomew Fair two years earlier; The Alchemist, she argued, ‘lost all its own brilliance and gained nothing in the exchange of its authentic world for that of frock coats and check trousers’ (Research Opportunities in Renaissance Drama, 21 [1978], 63). Some reviewers drew attention to a perceived mismatch between Campbell – an anarchic performer with a background in experimental theatre – and the role of Subtle. In a perceptive comment Chaillet noted that his ‘knockabout invention’ sat uneasily in a role ‘so tightly mechanized to frequent exits and entrances through many doors and frantic costume changes, that the clockwork precision should itself bring laughs’ (Times, 1 February 1978). The requirement that Subtle anchor the narrative was at odds with Campbell’s freewheeling style. Despite these negative reactions, however, in many respects it was Eyre’s production, rather than Nunn’s, that was to set out the perimeters for The Alchemist in performance over the next decade, as directors increasingly experimented with alternative settings and modes of presentation.
Questions relating to acting style were especially pressing in relation to the next major British revival, directed by the actor and comedian Griff Rhys Jones at the Lyric Hammersmith in September 1985 and featuring Stephen Moore as Subtle, Gavin Richards as Face and Sylvestra le Touzel as Doll. Jones’s cast came from a number of different performance traditions: Moore was an RSC veteran; Richards, who played Face, had performed extensively with Dario Fo; John Sessions, who played Ananias, Daniel Peacock (Dapper), and Jones himself – playing Mammon following the loss of two actors during rehearsals – were associated with the alternative comedy scene (see Sheridan Morley, Punch, 18 September 1985). Although Michael Ratcliffe thought it ‘one of the coolest, funniest and most intelligent productions of a Jonson play I have seen’ (Observer, 15 September 1985), some reviewers thought that the varying performance styles failed to cohere. Morley commented that ‘Acting styles crash into each other here like juggernauts in fog’, while Tony Howard argued that ‘In practice – perhaps thanks to the characters’ selfishness – the cast acted in their accustomed modes and hardly coalesced’ (Punch, 18 September 1985; Research Opportunities in Renaissance Drama, 28 [1986], 161). Nonetheless, individual performances impressed, and many of them were strikingly unconventional. Michael Coveney liked Jones’s relatively slimline Mammon, ‘sid[ling] on like a Regency dandy delivering his lush encomiums to self-indulgent philanthropy with a dry, barbed vocal tang’, and le Touzel’s Doll, ‘a reluctant whore with off-duty contempt for the operation expressed in hunched shoulders and a delightfully dilatory Fairy Queen’ (Financial Times, 10 September 1985). Michael Billington was amused by Moore’s ‘surprised astonishment at the continuing success of his imposture: “You were born upon a Wednesday”, he confidently tells Abel Drugger only to reel back when he realises he has hit the button’ (Guardian, 11 September 1985).
The setting was early nineteenth-century, ‘wittily examining through the text the nineteenth-century ethos of the self-made man’ (Cave, 1991, 91). Christopher Edwards thought that the setting produced ‘several good visual jokes, in particular a vision of Subtle … when, after one of the increasingly rapid changes he is called upon to make as the pace hots up, he enters deep in thought, dressed in a monk’s habit and sporting a pair of welder’s goggles’ (Spectator, 14 September 1985). Roger Glossop’s set was ‘a tall house which had become merely the outer shell for a three-storey furnace-cum-chemical works-cum-cathedral organ’, ‘crowded with stairways, catwalks, curtained cubicles, hissing pipes, tables groaning under bubbling retorts, and a miniature Dr Phibes-style organ substituting for Dol Common’s virginal’ (T. Howard, 1985, 161; Jim Hiley, Listener, 19 September 1985); Hiley’s reference to the vengeful concert organist played by Vincent Price in The Abominable Dr Phibes (1971) underlines the production’s horror-tinged ambience. The designer also contributed a notable coup de thé tre late in the play. When Lovewit returned home, ‘the place suddenly and for the first time resemble[d] a town house’, ‘the high ceiling proved to be a set of black shutters which the inquisitive neighbours hauled open, revealing a glass roof and the open sky. The play’s claustrophobia and monomania suddenly evaporated and the great furnace was revealed as a rather shoddy theatrical set’ (Coveney, Financial Times, 10 September 1985; T. Howard,1985, 162).
This production, and others of the 1980s, suggest that a new metatheatrical awareness was entering into theatrical interpretations of The Alchemist. Two years later, Gregory Hersov’s production, which began at the Royal Exchange, Manchester, and then toured the UK, again layered on visual detail. The Royal Exchange is theatre-in-the-round – an unusual configuration for Jonson’s plays in this period – and its lay-out was mimicked in touring performances. Designed by Laurie Dennell, the set was ‘dominated by furnace, bellows and retort, and overhung by a flickeringly-candled chandelier from which dangle cabbalistic signs’ (Martin Hoyle, Financial Times, 23 February 1987). Reviewers also noted the work of David Short’s period costumes in delineating character: ‘Abel Drugger (Ian Hastings) hovers patiently in tobacco-brown breeches, and Nick Stringer’s vast Sir Epicure is a cross between Henry VIII and a bursting bag of caramels’ (Jeremy Kingston, Times, 21 February 1987); ‘Michael Feast’s Subtle sports the ragged shreds of a Jacobean puff-breeched suit … Alyson Spiro’s tawney-maned Dol suggests the feline, but of the undomesticated variety, as implied in those striped sleeves’ (Hoyle, Financial Times, 23 February 1987); Jonathan Hackett’s Face had a ‘grotesquely strapped-on hump’ as Lungs (Eric Shorter, Daily Telegraph, 25 February 1987).
Kingston’s comment that Hersov appeared to have adhered to the adage ‘When in doubt, shout’, suggests that this was again a revival struggling to pitch Jonson on the right level; however, it succeeded in pulling its audience into the action, a strategy facilitated by in-the-round staging, and by performances such as Hastings’s ‘stolidly innocent Drugger … placidly trotting on to be conned and prompting an audience “aah” usually reserved for dogs or children’ (Hoyle, Financial Times, 23 February 1987). The production also had some imaginative touches in its staging. Hoyle writes that ‘The melting on the furnace of a naked female doll, kissed by Subtle, provides an impressive end to the first half’, while Elizabeth Schafer and Emma Cox describe the way in which, in a ‘memorable sound effect, the chink of money being dropped into a moneybox every time cash was forthcoming from the gulls, generated a very telling sense of how the booty was accumulating’ (2013).
Another touring production in the following year, directed by Michael Boyd for the Cambridge Theatre Company and designed by Paul Ling, broke with a tradition of visual clutter. It used a period setting, but in a remarkably self-conscious fashion. The drop curtain showed a Jacobean house ‘sprayed with modern graffiti’ and the performance opened with a ‘thump of rock music’; however, these were succeeded by Jacobean costumes and a ‘surprisingly bare’ panelled room, in which the ‘sobs and wails, [and] later mad laughter’ of plague victims outside could be heard whenever the front door was opened (Jeremy Kingston, Times, 13 February 1988; Martin Hoyle, Financial Times, 15 February 1988). Thus, in some respects the production appeared to historicize the text – especially in Bill Murdoch’s presentation of Drugger as ‘an ambitious Scot come south in the train of King James’ (Kingston, Times, 13 February 1988) – but it also held it at arm’s length, a strategy that was underlined in some of the performances. Like Sylvestra le Touzel three years earlier, and as if in rebuke to all the reviewers who cheerfully use words such as ‘trollop’, ‘tart’, or ‘strumpet’ to describe Doll, Laura Davenport sought to complicate the presentation of her character:
Hard-faced and blasé, she can scarcely hide her weary contempt of the punters, anxious to get the job over and not conceding even the flicker of a smile more than she is paid for … Her silent, crumbling collapse into bowed and bitter resignation at being double-crossed by Face conjures up a whole life-time of betrayals: a tough, haunting and totally real performance.
(Hoyle, Financial Times, 15 February 1988; see also Paul Taylor, Independent, 15 February 1988)
While this production does not appear to have offered an explicitly feminist interpretation of The Alchemist, it appears to have come closer than almost any other production to date.
Two of the decade’s most arresting productions appeared in 1989, and each in its way continued with the 1980s project of an interrogative, postmodern Alchemist. Robert David MacDonald’s production at Glasgow Citizens’ Theatre, designed by Stuart Laing, relocated the play to 1930s America, while Gregory L. Mortensen’s musical adaptation, The Scoundrel, was directed by Thomas Bradac at the Grove Shakespeare Festival, Orange County, California. MacDonald’s vividly imaginative production achieved, for Michael Coveney, ‘the crucial effect of displacing the real world with a surreal alternative’ (Financial Times, 2 February 1989). Lovewit’s apartment, ‘dominated by a mirror facing the audience’, was in ‘the basement of an elegant, black-and-white, many-levelled set’; it was transformed by the cheats into ‘an over-run bordello of banging doors, buzzing bells and distant traffic noises’ (Alastair Fowler, Times Literary Supplement, 10 February 1989; Coveney, Financial Times, 2 February 1989). However, Mary Brennan thought that ‘playing it in American accents … ends up a comic distraction in its own right, rather than a “decoding” mechanism’, describing Anne Myatt’s Doll – as if prove her own point – as ‘one SOO-POIB mauler of a moll’ (Glasgow Herald, 30 January 1989). Brennan thought that the ‘freak wig, white coat and foreign accent’ adopted by Peter Jonfield for Subtle’s disguise ‘make him too much the crackpot professor’; Coveney preferred Laurence Rudic’s Face, ‘a sly mutant who has exchanged a personality of granite servility for a new lease of life as a sinister, limping laboratory assistant worthy of Peter Lorre’ (Financial Times, 2 February 1989).
Cuts were ‘extremely heavy, [and] occasionally injurious to rhythm’ (Coveney, Financial Times, 2 February 1989): the Dapper plot and much of the obscenity and topical allusions were cut, in an apparent attempt to streamline the play, although once again the reference to the Armada remained. Alastair Fowler bemoaned the ‘irrelevant visual gags … a trick dog, a glass revolving on the phonograph’ and felt that ‘the long entrance hallway tells against pace in the final flurry of visits’ (Times Literary Supplement, 10 February 1989). Overall, Sarah Hemming thought ‘the whole thing feels like a vintage car with new body work – it looks great, has some wonderful details, but finds difficulty travelling forward’ (Independent, 4 February 1989). Again directors faced problems in making their alternative settings fully habitable for Jonson’s play, and in finding a balance between verbal and visual comedy.
Mortensen’s adaptation also used an American setting, in this case gold-rush California; Subtle became Dr Alerdyce T. Smooth, Face became Lucien Marmott, and Doll became Cassie Spooner. This was another production hampered by casting problems – The Alchemist seems unusually prone to them – as Mortensen was forced to step in as Marmott (Thomas O’Connor, Orange County Register, 28 September 1989; Jan Herman, LA Times, 6 October 1989). The setting was an appropriate one for the fevered greed of the play’s gulls: ‘Jonson’s Drugger has become a dim, Midwestern dry goods merchant, and the gambler Dapper is an inept card player named Whitrock. The sanctimonious puritans are now brimstone-pious Amish, while lecherous Sir Epicure Mammon is a nouveau riche with social, as well as sensual, ambitions’ (O’Connor, Orange County Register, 13 October 1989). The play also had a meta-theatrical frame, the main narrative supposedly being performed by a travelling company, and the combination of the historical distancing and the framing device appear to have muzzled the play’s satire. Like some other productions of The Alchemist, it apparently hit a high – and loud – note very early on, leaving the actors with nowhere to go in the later stages of the plot. Robert Koehler also commented that the physical movements of Mortensen and Daniel Bryan Cartmell, playing Smooth, were ‘too studied and careful for the farce to fly, which has a chain reaction effect on the ensemble’ (LA Times, 14 October 1989). Nonetheless, Bud Leslie’s Drugger was praised for managing ‘the not-inconsiderable achievement of executing the same sight gag no fewer than three times – it’s a secret handshake and is a tad too gross to describe – yet making the bit freshly funny each time’ (O’Connor, Orange County Register, 13 October 1989).
1990-99: Eclecticism
More traditional than any of these 1980s experiments, but perhaps more satisfying for audiences, was Sam Mendes’s revival at the RSC’s Swan theatre in September 1991, also seen at the Barbican Theatre in London in April 1992 (for detailed accounts see Potter, 1999; Mallin, 2007; Schafer and Cox, 2013; for a selection of images, see the Performance Archive). David Bradley’s ‘sour, grumpy’ Subtle partnered Jonathan Hyde’s ‘slyer, smilier, more secretive’ Face, and Joanne Pearce’s ‘unusually tough’ Doll (Benedict Nightingale, Times, 28 August, 1991; Michael Billington, Guardian, 17 April 1992). At Stratford, Anthony Ward’s set was ‘dominated by a brick wall with a large central door and further doors off to the side’ (Paul Taylor, Independent, 29 August 1991); only for Act 5 was it supplemented, as the walls at the back opened to reveal a version of Claes Janszoon Visscher’s 1616 panorama of London (see Nightingale, Times, 28 August 1991; Mallin, 2007, 224). At the Barbican the panorama became more prominent; the set was ‘a crescent of antique walls and doors backed by a giant lithograph of the City skyline’ (Nightingale, Times, 17 April 1992).
Eschewing both authentic period dress and the recreation of a specific historical period, Mendes’s production took an eclectic approach to set and costume which was to become widespread in 1990s performances of The Alchemist. The cast were ‘dressed in an amalgam of Jacobean and 20th century contemporary dress – Puritan ruffs, breeches, umbrellas and bow ties’ (Nicholas De Jongh, Evening Standard, 16 April 1992), as the production suggested the play’s contemporary relevance without entirely jettisoning the period setting. Moreover, it was thoroughly alert to the possibilities of costume, delighting in Face, Subtle, and Doll’s quick-changes. As Irving Wardle noted, ‘The show is partly about the magic of costume, as Joanne Pearce establishes from the outset when she tears off her blonde wig to assert her leadership of the gang’ (Independent on Sunday, 1 September 1991); the physical gesture also recalled Judi Dench’s 1965 performance. John Linklater called the production ‘RSC ensemble at its best’ (Glasgow Herald, 5 March 1992); every member of the cast was singled out by at least one reviewer, and in addition to Bradley, Hyde and Pearce, Philip Voss’s luxuriant Mammon, Guy Henry’s Ananias, ‘toes curling in his sandals as he rains down vehement curses on popery’ (Sarah Hemming, Independent, 17 April 1992), and Albie Woodington’s Drugger garnered a good deal of praise.
Responding to Mendes’s inventive detail, reviewers supplied unusually full descriptions of stage business. Woodington as Drugger ‘one point touchingly imitates the action of the angry Kastril [Alexis Daniel] by daringly placing his foot on the table’, while Kastril himself ‘is occasionally seen flying past the open door in pursuit of an opponent’ (Billington, Guardian, 29 August 1991; Hemming, Independent, 17 April 1992). Subtle ‘cons his customers with visual aids, including a “before” and “after” series featuring a gouty Henry VIII’ (Wardle, Independent on Sunday, 1 September 1991). Paul Taylor noted the handling of the end of the first half which, as in Hersov’s production in 1987, was given a neat twist:
The Alchemist is propelled forward by a series of knocks on the door. Mendes wittily underlines this fact by his droll ending to the first half. The tricksters sit silently at a table making little heaps of coins from that day’s ill-gotten gains. This unaccustomed lull is stretched to the point of absurdity when suddenly, just before the blackout, a jolting knock makes their eyes light up with smiling anticipation of another victim.
(Independent, 29 August 1991)
The climax of the Dapper plot was also a comic highlight, as Doll balanced on Face’s shoulders, concealing him under her voluminous skirts, and addressed Dapper in the tones of Elizabeth II, ‘caressing him the while with all four hands’ (Taylor, Independent, 29 August 1991). Like its RSC predecessor, the production finished with Face brandishing money; as Neil Taylor writes, ‘when Face appears to fling coins at the audience to close the show and they turn out to be glitter glittering in a spotlight, there is something chilling as well as charming in the conceit and the spectacle’ (Plays International 7 [1991], 21). Creating a distorted echo of the ending of Nunn’s 1977 revival, and perhaps invoking Thatcherite preoccupations with money and get-rich schemes, Mendes’s revival also made an implicit case for the centrality of The Alchemist – and Jonson in general – to the repertory of the RSC.
Two years later, the Washington Stage Guild’s high-tempo revival, directed by John MacDonald, again attempted to redress the gender balance of Jonson’s play by casting two women, Kara Russell and Mary Tucker, as the puritans. The set, designed by Carl Gudenius, was tailored to the characters’ physical movement. The side walls were ‘lined with doors for people to duck in and out of’, and it featured ‘a couple of side staircases that climb to the balcony – as does much of the cast at some point’ (Lloyd Rose, Washington Post, 26 January 1993; Hap Erstein, Washington Times, 27 January 1993). In a production that met with mixed reactions, Daniel R. Escobar’s ‘mousy meek and slyly squeaky’ Drugger was praised, but Helena Kuukka’s lighting was criticised, Erstein commenting, ‘It changes intensity at the oddest times and botches its one attempt at a special effect, when a basement explosion needs to be simulated’ (Washington Times, 27 January 1993).
The two revivals of 1996 were rather more substantial. The first was staged by Company B at the Belvoir Street Theatre, Sydney. The Alchemist had developed an intermittent performance tradition in Australia, with five productions between 1972 and 1980, but this revival was the most prominent and most successful of them all (on Australian Alchemists see also Schafer, 1999b; Schafer and Cox, 2013). Directed by Neil Armfield, at that time building his reputation as a deft interpreter of classic drama, it was described by one excited reviewer as ‘rumbustious, bawdy, sublimely comic, swaggeringly clever theatre’ (Pamela Payne, Sun Herald, 1 September 1996). Kym Barrett’s costumes spanned four centuries, and Stephen Curtis’s set was ‘skewed and manic’, but the production was centred not on visual display but on ‘a seductively decadent set of performances by a group of very good actors to whom Armfield has given free and glorious rein’ (John McCallum, Australian, 29 August 1996). The most acclaimed performance was Geoffrey Rush’s Subtle, a ‘scabrous, vile, grotty, energetic, febrile – an exultantly life-affirming cockroach’, ‘[o]ne moment leadenly brooding, the next a glint-eyed extravagance of high-sounding bunkum, obscene, childish, dissolute and disorderly’ (Australian, 29 August 1996; Sun Herald, 1 September 1996). However, Hugo Weaving’s ‘suave and calculating’ Face and Gillian Jones’s Doll, clad in ‘grubby net flounces’ as the Queen of Fairy, were also praised, as was Max Cullen’s Mammon, ‘in hopeful maroon velvet … translucently foolish, pushing his barrow of kitchen junk – base metal that soon will be gold’ (James Waites, Sydney Morning Herald, 29 August 1996; Sun Herald, 1 September 1996). In one striking touch, Kastril (Daniel Wyllie) and Dame Pliant (Rebecca Massey) were both ‘played outrageously in broad New Zealand accents’ (Sydney Morning Herald). Like Boyle’s 1988 production, the revival thus played with the social and cultural connotations that accents can bring with them. This was one way in which the play was ‘Australianised’ – here encapsulating some Australians’ attitudes towards their geographical neighbours – and as Elizabeth Schafer notes, Armfield built upon Sydney’s Nimrod Theatre’s productions of Shakespeare in the 1970s, which ‘led the way … in strenuously rejecting Anglicised performances of early modern plays’ (1999, 194; see also Schafer and Cox, 2013).
In an interview, Rush highlighted a problem that has often faced The Alchemist in performance: its opening moments. The audience’s abrupt immersion into the ongoing quarrel between Subtle and Face means that modern audiences often have difficulty acclimatising to the play’s language. As described above, da Costa’s production in 1948 and Dews’s in 1970 added new introductory sequences, while others have retained the play’s original prologue. Company B took an alternative approach, adapting the ‘argument’ with which Jonson prefaced the printed text; as Rush explains,
After we’d opened we put the acrostic Argument in. The lights came up with Subtle and Face and Doll onstage, ready to go, in a freeze and Lovewit spoke it as a prologue. Even that was quite dense; it’s very lean and pithy writing, but it does give you an inkling of story. That helped enormously; it gave the audience a chance to look at the room, look at who we were and theatrically it suited the play because it opened the play out instantly; somebody came up and spoke to the audience – whereas the fight is so inward.
(Schafer, 1999b, 197)
If The Alchemist is dependent on its audience’s sense of place – as many critics and reviewers have argued – it is at times equally necessary for productions to give them a chance to acclimatise.
1996’s second revival, a co-production between the Birmingham Repertory Theatre and the National Theatre, directed by Bill Alexander, explored one of the few settings not previously employed for The Alchemist. Many productions adopt the description ‘scene, London’ in their programmes; this added ‘time, the future’ (Benedict Nightingale, Times, 18 September 1996). William Dudley’s set, with its ‘vast metallic doors, walkways and queer contraptions’ provided a Lovewit’s house ‘composed of an eccentric conglomeration of bits of defunct cars (radiators, hub caps etc) and the tricksters keep their ill-gotten dosh in an old Belisha beacon bulb’ (Michael Billington, Guardian, 18 September 1996; Paul Taylor, Independent, 18 September 1996). ‘The impression’, said Benedict Nightingale, ‘is that some mad blacksmith made scores of cogs, spanners, pipes, radiators, candlesticks and a few instruments of torture, and then squashed them into a sort of black brutalist Gothic: Gormenghast chic’ (Times, 18 September 1996). Carole Woddis in The Glasgow Herald thought it ‘a wondrous visual joke on both the alchemical process and a kind of distant referral to the inner organs of the body politic’ (26 October 1996).
Reviewers tended to dwell either on the set or on Simon Callow’s transformations as Face – ‘he deftly flits out of his butch cockney voice, with a touch of camp and into the role of moustachioed, affected Military Captain, Birmingham stoker and Scottish manservant’ (Nicholas De Jongh, Evening Standard, 10 October 1996); in Nightingale’s opinion, ‘he performs with such relish and glee that you catch yourself wishing Jonson had provided him with even more opportunities to play games with his hair, teeth and accent: Face as Falklands sheep-tycoon, perhaps, or Face as scavenging yeti’ (Times, 18 September 1996). Among the other performances, there was also praise for Doll, played by the actress and comedian Josie Lawrence, ‘a voracious Cockney spiv, feeding the customers’ sexual illusions while wrenching the ring off Mammon’s finger with brutal force’ (Billington, Guardian, 18 September 1996).
For the decade’s last revival, The Alchemist returned to the Stratford Festival, Ontario, in July 1999, under the direction of Douglas Campbell. Like Alexander’s production, it was thought by some commentators to be overdesigned. However, despite the cluttered stage, featuring ‘tarnished statuary, a dressmaker’s dummy, bits and pieces of old bicycles, mouldering candles and numerous other less identifiable objects’ (Jamie Portman, Ottawa Citizen, 9 July 1999), reviewers’ anxiety mostly focused not on sets but on costume. Employing a now-familiar mixture of early modern and contemporary elements, John Colm Leberg’s costumes were described by one reviewer as ‘often unwearable, slowing the action, making the actors visibly uncomfortable and distracting the audience from their performances. Here, little details like a cleric’s holey socks and huge gestures like Dol’s fairy costume of black leatherette crinoline and pink antennae are amusing of themselves but cumulatively suggest no great purpose and produce a cloying effect of surfeit’ (Kate Taylor, Globe and Mail, 29 June 1999). The production had difficulty making disparate elements cohere, and the costumes thus threatened to swamp fine performances from Benedict Campbell as Face, Diane D’Aquilla as Doll, Keith Dinicol as Subtle, and James Blendick as Mammon. Also of note was the tactic adopted in relation to characters’ accents – comparable with that of Boyle in 1988 and Armfield in 1996 – in which ‘the three principals speak the criminals’ lines in North American tones until their characters dress up as various magical figures to trick their victims, at which point their accents become British’ (Globe and Mail, 29 June 1999). The reviewer does not specify which British accents were used; it seems likely that they were some variety of ‘received pronunciation’. In a North American context, these kinds of British accents can suggest authority and urbanity, but also pretension, deceit and snobbery; all of these connotations were potentially invoked here.
2000-12: Star Casting, Financial Crisis and the Fringe
1990s productions of The Alchemist explored new avenues for the play in their willingness to mingle period and modern elements. In the early twentieth century, performances of The Alchemist looked back to earlier, eighteenth-century, traditions in two respects: star casting and, during the global economic recession that began in 2008, increased topicality in the wake of various scandals in the housing market and banking sector. They also displayed new variations on earlier practices, such as cross-gender casting, textual adaptation, and wholesale updating.
Star casting returned to The Alchemist in 2000, when Dan Castellaneta, best known as the voice of Homer Simpson in the ground-breaking cartoon sit-com The Simpsons, was cast as Subtle in the Classic Stage Company’s revival in New York, directed by Barry Edelstein. Set in what one reviewer described as a ‘fictive present’, with ‘grimy industrial rooms’, the production opened with Doll, Subtle, and Face ‘clatter[ing] down a metal flight of stairs fighting like the Three Stooges’ (Charles McNulty, Village Voice, 29 February 2000; Charles Isherwood, Variety, 21 February 2000;Sarah Boxer, New York Times, 25 February 2000). Subtle was played ‘with feverish improvisatory abandon’ by Castellanata (who claimed to have modelled the character’s voice on Peter Sellers’s languid Major Bloodnok from the BBC radio comedy The Goon Show), Jeremy Shamo’s Face was ‘a master of false courtliness and Igor-like servility’, while Johann Carlo’s Doll ‘in a blond wig and red leather suit, descends the stair, talking to a toy monkey and singing “Hello, Dolly!” in a baby voice’ (New York Times, 25 February 2000; ‘Weekly Edition: The Best of NPR News’, National Public Radio, 22 April 2000). The text was cut by almost a half, and the supporting characters were updated: Matthew Saldivar’s Surly ‘is turned into a sexy Latino stud out of “West Side Story,” with slicked hair and leather jacket’, his lines spoken ‘in clipped, ethnic-inflected Brooklynese’. Hillel Meltzer’s Drugger, favourably compared by Clive Barnes to Alec Guinness’s portrayal, was ‘a nebbish with a nasal bleat’, while Reuben Jackson’s Kastril ‘sports an afro and a “black power” button’ (Variety, 21 February 2000; Barnes, New York Post, 27 February 2000). Vocal ticks and costumes thus functioned as short-cuts to characterisation, an approach that The Alchemist is often thought to require, as earlier productions also demonstrated.
In place of the star casting of Edelstein’s production, Berkeley Repertory Theatre’s performance of Joan Holden’s adaptation, which opened almost simultaneously on the opposite coast of the US, opted for cross-gender casting. Two characters were performed by actors of the opposite sex, the drag queen Steven LeMay playing Dame Pliant and Sharon Lockwood playing Subtle (see Mark de la Vina, San Jose Mercury News, 25 February 2000). Tony Taccone commented of Lockwood, ‘I went all around the country looking for a Subtle who’s a guy and I couldn’t find (a male actor) who’s close to Sharon in terms of what she can do’ (Sam Whiting, San Francisco Chronicle, 20 February 2000). In casting Subtle and Dame Pliant in this manner, the production underlined the fluidity of identity in the play, and it also implicitly redressed the gender balance between the three leads. Lockwood’s Subtle, ‘rattl[ing] off her nonsensical incantations in a salesman’s staccato’, Geoff Hoyle’s Face – ‘His signature touch … a wheezing groan, menacing proof of all his hard labors’ – and Audrey Ann Smith’s Doll were all well-liked, but the stand-out performance seems to have been Ken Ruta’s Mammon, with ‘long gray hair, papery skin, a sparkling dandy jacket, and what looks like a fine tablecloth for pants’, scampering around in pursuit of Doll (Steven Winn, San Francisco Chronicle, 25 February 2000; Michael Scott Moore, SF Weekly, 8 March 2000). Gabriel Berry’s costumes ‘dance[d] delightfully between cartoon and reality’, ‘a mess of pleats, lace, lurid colors and patchwork that flatter nothing but the wearer’s own vanity’, ‘bolts of rock music’ marked changes of scene, and Kent Dorsey’s revolving set was ‘slumped down with deceit; there’s not a true right angle in sight’ (Pat Craig, Constra Costa Times, 29 February 2000; Winn San Francisco Chronicle, 25 February 2000).
Two years later, in 2002, a further echo of The Alchemist’s tradition of star casting appeared in April de Angelis’s play A Laughing Matter, directed by Max Stafford Clark at the National Theatre, London, in December 2002, which featured a scene in which Jason Watkins’s Garrick first played the role of Abel Drugger. Earlier in the year, however, Josh Bennathan’s revival for Present Moment at the Riverside Studios, Hammersmith, eschewed celebrity casting in favour of vigorous updating. The production, variously described as ‘gloriously colourful and energetic’, ‘hectic’ and ‘raucous’, provoked perhaps the widest range of reactions from critics since Guthrie’s production forty years earlier (Katherine Duncan-Jones, New Statesman, 28 January 2002; Ian Johns, Times, 22 January 2002; Lucy Powell, Time Out, 16 January 2002). Most of the reviewers approved of the 1980s setting, with Pet Shop Boys, Madonna, and Mel and Kim on the soundtrack, pinstripes and a pointy bra among the costumes, Rosalind Adler and Steve Nealon’s Anabaptists as ‘Southern fundamentalist zealots’, and Gavin Molloy’s Kastril as ‘the kind of tweedy young chump who could not read The Spectator without moving his lips’ (Paul Taylor, Independent, 16 January 2002). (Perhaps appropriately, one of the more damning reviews was Toby Young’s in The Spectator [26 January 2002].) As Katherine Duncan-Jones noted, ‘the performance as a whole constantly reminds us how many of the crazes and “lifestyles” launched in the 1980s are now going stronger than ever’ (New Statesman). Jens Demant Cole’s set had ‘seven doors through which people are bundled out as more arrive, divided by mirrors which reflect the vanity of characters and audience alike’ (Neil Dowden, Stage, 17 January 2002), and the self-reflexive quality of the production was heightened by the recasting of Lovewit as just another yuppie on the make. Nonetheless, there were widely diverging assessments of the performances, albeit with widespread approval for Don Gilet’s Subtle and Arthur Caulfield’s notably young Face.
Strenuous updating also marked one of the decade’s best-received revivals, directed by Nicholas Hytner, which opened in the National Theatre’s Olivier auditorium in September 2006 (for an overview of reviews see Comeford, 2007). The central casting of Alex Jennings as Subtle and Simon Russell Beale as Face was trailed extensively, and the production built on a sense of their close collaboration; Jennings joked in an interview, ‘We’ve played around with the idea of getting muddled and suddenly swapping performances’ (Paul Taylor, ‘The Dream Team’, Independent,7 September 2006). Taylor noted the ‘bitchy power games, reciprocal testing and shared private jokes’ in the two men’s performances (Independent, 15 September 2006), and Russell Beale said, tellingly, ‘There’s a lot of tension between [Face and Subtle] based on class and education’ (Taylor, Independent,7 September 2006).
The production succeeded in presenting a convincing contemporary London setting, ‘involving born-again Christians, wannabe rappers, posh birds, American self-help merchants and all the other ragtag and bobtail that thrives so exuberantly in the capital’ (Rosie Millard, New Statesman, 25 September 2006). Mark Boxer’s rotating set was ‘a cross-section of a gentrified Georgian house … Gentrified at the front, seedy at the back’, with ‘two staircases that only encourage more and more clownish running up and down as the convoluted plot unfolds’ (Millard, New Statesman, 25 September 2006; Christopher Hart, Sunday Times, 17 September 2006). Despite the expansive Olivier stage, the revival appears to have retained the play’s sense of claustrophobia. Susannah Clapp wrote that it ‘gives a glimpse of blackened London terraces through the framework of the room, but never loses that sense of enclosure, of being hemmed in, which gives the action its desperate momentum’ (Observer, 17 September 2006). There were sight gags involving the Deputy Prime Minister, John Prescott, and, possibly for political balance, the Conservative-supporting actress Joan Collins. While this approach might have risked gimmickry, Tim Walker argued that ‘it’s so skilfully done that the play seems to come to life on its own terms’ (Sunday Telegraph, 17 September 2006).
The treatment of the disguises was especially vivid, with rapid costume changes and a range of increasingly silly accents. Jennings ranged from ‘a Haight-Asbury-style hippy to a pious New Age guru and a fluting Scot’, while Russell Beale mutated from ‘bogus naval officer in blazer and terrible blond wig, to a weirdly ingratiating sidekick in goggles and rubber gloves who might have wandered in from a Dracula movie, or indeed the Rocky Horror Show’ (Taylor, Independent, 15 September 2006; Charles Spencer, Daily Telegraph, 15 September 2006). Leslie Manville’s Doll was ‘cool where most actresses would wench it’, ‘spill[ing] carelessly out of holey tights and fluffy mules’ in the opening scene, but clad in little black dress, pearls and upper-crust accent for the encounter with Mammon (Clapp, Observer, 17 September 2006).
The gulls were also strongly cast. The Anabaptists became ‘doorstep born-agains, in putty-coloured windcheaters and antiquated specs; one of them puts a licked finger to his comb-over before creeping towards the door-knocker’ (Clapp, Observer, 17 September 2006). Tristan Beint’s Kastril was ‘a kind of Old Harrovian would-be rapper, awkwardly throwing gang signs as he talks about hearing “some speech of the angry boys” [3.4.21-2]’ (Walker, Sunday Telegraph, 17 September 2006). Amit Shah’s ‘lanky and sweetly nervy’ Drugger was a cornershop owner desperate to make a success of his venture (David Benedict, Variety, 25 September-1 October 2006); the strength of his performance appears to have made a potentially reductive concept viable and amusing. Ian Richardson, in his last major stage performance, was widely praised as a ‘funny yet touchingly wistful’ Mammon (Walker, Sunday Telegraph, 17 September 2006). Clapp’s perceptive review captures one of the strengths of this performance: ‘he drops the speeches with restraint, never over-egging the plush vocabulary, but allowing each over-fruity phrase to speak for itself. And then, right at the end, reaching his apogee, he allows a moment of excess in one long warbling sigh’ (Observer, 17 September 2006). As in earlier productions, the ending of the play was treated in a striking manner. The victorious Face sat alone on the stage, deflated and depressed, in what was perhaps a deliberate reworking of earlier images of the triumphant Face of Nunn’s and Mendes’s RSC productions.
By 2009, the year of major revivals in Australia and the USA, The Alchemist was topical, once again, in the wake of a world-wide financial collapse. The first revival, a co-production by the Sydney-based Bell Shakespeare Company and the Queensland Theatre Company, opened in Brisbane’s QPAC in February 2009 before touring nationally. One reviewer noted that ‘Whole lines lifted from this play could describe a collapsing bank or a Ponzi scheme’ (Canberra Times, 2 May 2009); yet director John Bell eschewed easy topicality and rejected the more or less realist settings often used for The Alchemist. Instead, in a manoeuvre that recalled the postmodern productions of the 1980s, he heightened the play’s metatheatricality (see Schafer and Cox, 2013). In an interview, Bell commented:
It’s set in someone’s house so you could do it in period in a Jacobean house, or you could update to a modern [house]. It has to be London, so you could do it in one of those big old Kensington houses or a smart, new condominium. But I thought, the more you think of it in those terms, the more of a sitcom it seems – it doesn’t resonate.
So we started with an empty space, like a rehearsal room, or backstage in a theatre, with costumes on the racks and a make-up mirror for the actors. And they all sit around on the sides and watch each other performing.
(Chris Hook, Daily Telegraph [Australia], 18 March 2009)
As Mark Naglazas describes, Bell and designer Bruce McKinven, ‘created a space that looks like a rehearsal room, with a large mirror, tables and chairs, costume racks forming doorways and, to stage right, a pleasant-looking young woman who is the show’s actual stage manager’ (West Australian, 16 April 2009). The cast of six actors from Brisbane and six from Sydney were asked to choose their own costumes from the stocks of the two participating companies, and took them from the racks as required.
Responses from audiences appear to have been highly positive. William Yeoman described the play’s reception at the performance he attended: ‘I never expected an audience to laugh so hard or burst into so much spontaneous applause during the performance of a early 17th century play as it did on Friday night’ (West Australian, 18 May 2009). As often appears to be the case for successful productions of The Alchemist, a range of performances were mentioned by reviewers. Patrick Dickson’s ‘repulsive and engaging’ Subtle was balanced by Andrew Tighe’s Face, played ‘with precision and steadiness’ (West Australian, 18 May 2009; Canberra Times, 2 May 2009). Georgina Symes’s leggy, bewigged Doll Common reminded many commentators of Amy Winehouse, and Symes commented in an interview, ‘I like the idea of Dol being a bit of a bower bird; that she collects things from her life and has stolen things from people so she is actually able to become a different woman depending on who she is with’ (Christian Wilkinson, Guardian Express, 12 May 2009). As such, she was perhaps the ultimate expression of the production’s magpie tendency.
Russell Kiefel’s Lovewit was ‘a spivvy wheeler-dealer with a machine-gun laugh’, David Whitney’s Mammon was obese and ‘hilariously gross’, Scott Witt’s Kastril was viewed by one reviewer as a cross between Sacha Baron Cohen’s satirical suburban gangster-wannabe Ali G and racing jockey Darren Beadman, and Liz Skitch’s Dame Pliant ‘blinks obtusely and shuffles about without a clue’ (Jo Litson, Sunday Telegraph, 29 March 2009; Canberra Times, 2 May 2009). The production also entertainingly and pointedly differentiated between Ananias and Tribulation, like Armfield’s 1996 production selectively Australianising elements of the play; as Yeoman describes, ‘If Peter Kowitz is part-Amish, part-American evangelical preacher as Tribulation Wholesome, it’s the tight-suited Richard Sydenham who shines the spotlight on our own religious and political environment, his Ananias a formidable combination of John Howard, George Pell and Tony Abbott’ (West Australian, 18 May 2009). Satire of the right-wing politicians Howard and Abbott, and the Roman Catholic archbishop of Sydney, known for his conservative views on some social issues, rooted The Alchemist in specific topical contexts.
Later in the year, the Shakespeare Theatre Company’s revival in Washington, DC, was less warmly received. Director Michael Kahn had a strong record with Shakespeare and Jonson, having staged fondly remembered productions of Love’s Labour’s Lost and Epicene. However, like its Stratford Festival predecessor in 1999, this modern-dress production appeared to be in thrall to its own eclectic costumes. The effect was seemingly heightened by James Noone’s set, in which Lovewit’s home was a luxury town-house with nine doors, closed off by a hard front curtain, representing its façade, in Act 5. The façade was in place as the audience entered and ‘its tidy classicism, and the demure pre-show music, created a decorous effect that was shattered by blaring rock as the play began’ (James Loehlin, Shakespeare Bulletin 28.1 [2010], 186). The updating was also clear in the text, in which – for once – Dame Pliant’s reference to the Armada was removed; her hatred for Spaniards instead stemmed ‘from a bad paella’ (Loehlin, 187). Loehlin suggested that Subtle (Kyle Fabel) and Doll (Kate Skinner) were ‘cast as older characters, rather worn out in their respective trades’ (186), a tactic that was coherent enough but left rather too much work for Michael Milligan’s Face, who had to maintain much of the play’s comic energy.
For Jayne Blanchard the production resembled ‘a vaudevillian runway show, as endless costumes sashay across the stage’ (Washington Times, 16 October 2009). Subtle, Face, and Doll assumed new costumes for each of the gulls, their quick changes underlining the production’s emphasis on fluidity and instability. David Sabin’s Mammon had borrowed ‘Donald Trump’s fat-cat suits and dipsy-doodle comb-over’, changing into ‘a flashy gold Elvis get-up’ when he thought that he was about to gain the philosopher’s stone; Jeff Biehl’s Drugger was a hippie; Nick Cordileone’s Dapper ‘glide[d] in like one of the sports of “Guys and Dolls”’, at one point even singing ‘Luck Be a Lady’, while Timothy Thomas’s drawling Tribulation was ‘a Jimmy-Swaggert-style televangelist in a frosted pompadour and white suit’. Doll Common ‘descend[ed] a staircase in the glittery pouffe of Glinda, the Good Witch of the North’ (Washington Times, 16 October 2009;Loehlin, 186-7; Peter Marks, Washington Post, 13 October 1999). The overall result seemed merely to wear reviewers out.
Around the turn of the decade, three relatively low-profile productions in The Alchemist’s home town, London, epitomised different approaches to the play. Scarlett Plouviez Comnas’s revival, which opened at the Rosemary Branch theatre in Islington, in March 2010, used a modern-day setting; in Time Out, Andrzej Lukowski thought that Keving Millington’s ‘slimy’ Subtle reminded him of the television and stage illusionist Derren Brown, and wondered whether Daniel Moore’s Mammon was ‘a rather nice parody of that other noted bumbler, Boris Johnson’, then Mayor of London (Time Out, 1 April 2010). The following September, Firehouse Creative Productions’ revival at Hoxton Hall, an old music hall in East London, re-imagined the play with the help of testimony from people on Hoxton Street Market. Except for the opening prologue, which retained Jonson’s language with the addition of some contemporary references, the dialogue was modernised (Lukowski, Time Out, 2 September 2010); the action was explicitly located in the theatre itself, Face becoming the caretaker, Dave. However, Jonson’s narrative was retained, and many of the strategies taken in characterising and costuming the gulls were familiar from earlier productions: ‘There’s a city lawyer with a gambling problem, a new age hippy with lesbian leanings, a daft and horny toff investing in the development of the philosopher’s stone and eternal life, a pair of Sloaney siblings comprising a posh boy with gangsta aspirations and his stupid heiress sister and a deranged American Scientologist mother and daughter’ (Lindsey Clarke, Londonist, 1 September 2010, http://londonist.com/2010/09/theatre_review_the_alchemist_hoxton.php ).
In April 2012, The Alchemist was revived by Let Them Call it Mischief, a company dedicated to reviving older plays and lesser-known plays about London, at the White Bear Theatre in Kennington, South London. The White Bear has an outstanding record of mounting productions of early modern drama in its ‘Lost Classics’ strand, and The Alchemist was one of a number of Jonson plays staged there in recent years. The costumes were late Victorian and the set, designed by Ele Slade, was a scaled-up wonder-cabinet with a series of drawers, windows and pull-out sections. As Peter Kirwan comments, ‘varied use of this single piece of set allowed the location a certain fluidity, while maintaining a fixed sense of place’ (The Bardathon, 12 April 2012, http://blogs.nottingham.ac.uk/bardathon/2012/04/12/the-alchemist-let-them-call-it-mischief-the-white-bear-london). The physical limitations imposed by the staging also provoked some deft solutions, such as the sequence in Act 5 in which Lovewit’s neighbours were represented by a series of hat-wearing hands protruding from the wonder cabinet’s innards.
Yet again, The Alchemist faced casting problems, and director Danny Wainwright stood in for Gary Heron as Face; nonetheless, the production was strongly cast, and featured a stand-out performance from Andrew Venning as an unusually youthful and virile Mammon, whirling around on a hobby horse, attempted to silence Stephanie Hampton’s ranting Doll by smothering her with increasingly desperate kisses, and stealing drinks from the front row. The Anabaptists were recast as nuns, and even vivid performances from Claire Cartwright as Ananias and Holly Blair could not elide some of the contradictions this decision created; more confusing were the cuts to the second half of the play, which included Doll’s performance as the Queen of Fairy and the final exchange between Doll and Subtle (for detailed discussion see Kirwan).
As it begins its fifth century, The Alchemist is probably as regularly performed as at any point in its history. However, while these recent productions, staged across a range of London fringe venues, suggest the allure of the play to contemporary theatre-makers, they also signal some of its problems – its large cast and range of characters; its few roles for women; its complex and knotty plot; its farce structures; its challenging language; and its dependence on allusion and on both temporal and spatial location. If Jonson’s comedy offers theatrical alchemy it has also, at times, epitomised the deceptive illusion of the alchemist’s art. Nonetheless, as the best productions have shown, it continues to represent one of the most exhilarating challenges in the dramatic canon.
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