For details of the first production of The Magnetic Lady, see the Introduction to the Print Edition (6:393-411), which describes the published attacks on the play and its playwright, and Jonson’s responses to his enemies. After that unpleasant reception, the play went entirely unstaged until 1987. Unlike the original production, the (to date) three modern productions of The Magnetic Lady have caused much less stir.

Peter Barnes’s adaptation for Ian Cotterell’s BBC Radio 3 production on 18 September 1987 was broadcast to mark 350 years since Jonson's death. This played well under two hours with good performances all around, notably from Elizabeth Spriggs as Keep, Dilys Laye as Polish, and Dinsdale Landen as the coolly manipulative Compass. Brian Woolland’s production at the Bridges Theatre, Reading University, 4-7 December 1996, demonstrated the vigour of the play on a bare stage that also allowed a free flow of activity from the aisles, thus, according to Peter Happé, bearing out ‘Jonson’s conception of the dramatic space’ as open and unfixed (Happé, ed., Mag. Lady, p. 27) . This treatment of playing space worked in an indeterminately modern-dress production with distinctively modern choices in casting: for example, Dr Rut gave a remarkable performance, with the wheelchair-bound actor using his disability to great advantage. The epigrammatic character sketches of Act 1 were played as stand-up-comic routines, one of many deliberately audience-conscious turns that proved Jonson’s viable theatricality. Both of these productions have been reviewed: see David Nokes in the Times Literary Supplement, 25 September 1987, p. 1049, and Happé, ed., Mag. Lady, pp. 21-9.

Martin White’s production in the Wickham Theatre, Bristol University (December 2000), played with a different metatheatricality, placing Miss Probee and Ms Damplay almost invisibly in the audience, where they chattered to the people around them and directed their lines even to people sitting behind them, much to the amusement of those who (finally) caught on to the performance. The framing conceit of the production was that The Magnetic Lady, as a theatre school show in the Wickham (that is, as another angle of the metatheatricality), was not ready for staging, and that Damplay spoke on the audience’s behalf to demand a play of some kind. Instead of the ‘Boy of the house’, the role of the prompt-boy was shared by different student-actors who were ostensibly there only to rehearse the play, but who eventually agreed to offer an off-the-cuff performance. This production choice answers the question, ‘How does early modern metatheatricality work for a modern audience?’ Although the theatre-school frame wittily overcame some of the problems of the Induction and Choruses, the device was not carried through very far, except for the Choruses, in which the actors, and not the Boy of the house, engaged in the subsequent discussions with Damplay and Probee. The actors’ dialogue with these scripted spectators was always modernised ‘in their own words’, paraphrasing the lines Jonson wrote for the Boy, sometimes repeating earlier trains of thought for clarification. On one occasion, an extract from a scene was restaged to show Damplay that Rut had indeed talked of Placentia’s obsessional eating habits very early in the play and had therefore paved the way for the disclosure of pregnancy.

The object here was to set up the idea of direct interaction and interdependency between spectator and performer, but beyond the Damplay/Probee scenes that goal may not have been achieved at a very sophisticated level. The audience sat in tiered blocks of twenty on four sides of a raised wooden rectangle with walkways between the raised stage and the audience seating. The actors thus had to play to an audience all round them, and on opening night, at least, found it difficult to connect directly with spectators, except for Damplay and Probee – that is to say, like most modern actors, they were deliberately erecting a ‘fourth wall’ in every direction, rather than exploring the rhetorically more inclusive options common among early modern actors. The four-sided staging seemed in fact to inhibit the actors from making contact with the audience: there was virtually no direct address, and asides tended to be between characters rather than nudges to spectators. So although Damplay and Probee commented apparently on behalf of the audience, neither they nor the other actors in the play proper used the audience in any substantial way. Instead, they offered excellent performances enclosed in a self-consciously ‘stagey’ world – a successful and appropriately-played production, with many particularly fine characterisations, but one in which the metatheatrical device of the Damplay/Probee scenes seemed separated from the play itself. On the other hand, the metatheatricality was tested another way in the very effective doubling of Needle and Bias. When the two characters had to appear together in the last scene, the actor simply changed on stage from one character to the other, indifferent to the fact that the audience could observe the transformation.

This production dealt with problems of gender and cross-casting by necessity, since the logistics of student enrolment meant that Dr Rut, Item, the apothecary (who doubled as Chair, the midwife), Moth Interest, and the two choric spectators had to be female. Playing Rut and Item as female made it harder to believe that neither the doctor nor the apothecary could detect the pregnancy, and thus the Rut-Item pairing balanced the Polish-Keep conspiracy with interesting ‘feminist’ resonances. Thanks to the opaque costume change, spectators could not recognize the Item/Chair doubling, thus avoiding the creation of another level of con-game that might have confused the plot. On the downside, playing Interest as ‘Lady Moth’ meant that female conspiracy was over-modelled in the production, making it seem a wider socio-political challenge requiring male correction rather than a domestic aberration.

Although the female Dr Rut eliminated any sense of the character as a sexist lout, the tension in the first half of the play derived from the degree of uncertainty each character expressed over Placentia’s condition, and certainly exposed Rut’s practice of medicine as fraudulent. The result was a multiplicity of staged responses, as characters were seeing the pregnancy but not accepting it directly, and looking for other explanations because that explanation – that a fourteen-year-old heiress of pious parentage and upbringing might engage in or even know about pre-marital sex – was not acceptable or even comprehensible.

Compass’s proposal to Pleasance was also a problem the actors tried to resolve. Was he an opportunist or a secret lover? Did Pleasance know by mute signs of his love, and did she respond, thus suggesting a tacit agreement between the two? Did she notice and reject Practice’s shy love, or simply not see his feelings because she focused on Compass? How deliberate is the echo of Beatrice and Benedick in Much Ado About Nothing when Pleasance calls Compass in to dinner? Pleasance’s acceptance of Compass – ‘With you the world o’er!’ (4.5.17) – expressed both her relief and her exasperation at his wooing as a ‘riddle’ or ‘love-trick’ (2.7.12-13) rather than a direct expression of love. By contrast, Placentia played her wooing scenes as strongly sexual, especially in the teasing ‘in a chair or upon a bed’ (2.5.77-8), aptly balanced by Needle’s costume (the tailor’s phallic yard, and a large pincushion-codpiece). Altogether, this production was thoughtful, clearly articulated by the young cast, and relied provocatively on commedia dell’arte physicality to render the play accessible to its audience.

I am grateful to Brian Woolland, who acted as my eyes on the Bristol production, sending me an email report of it, and kindly allowed me view the Reading production on video. I subsequently saw the Bristol production on video with Martin White talking me through it; he also arranged for me to interview the actors in the spring of 2001. Sam Alexander, one of the actors, sent me the modernised Induction and Choruses which he had written and helped to direct, and allowed me to read his final paper on the metatheatrical impact of the modernisation. I have made liberal use of all these sources, and any mistakes are my own.