Last night I was at the Cineplex to enjoy the satellite telecast of the comic farce The Magistrate by Sir Arthur Wing Pinero, a popular dramatist of the Victorian era.
The play was originally staged in London in 1885, and took audiences and critics by surprise as Pinero was mainly known up till then for his dramas of social problems. His most famous piece, then as now, was probably The Second Mrs. Tanqueray which showed the unpleasant consequences that followed when a man in good society dared to marry a "lady" from the demi-monde.
The Magistrate, on the other hand, is a full-throttle comic farce in the French tradition, and a very fine example of the genre indeed. So although many theatre-goers today may not be familiar with it, the play has in fact been revived in London at fairly regular intervals ever since its premiere, and always with great success.
The plot structure of The Magistrate immediately reminded me of Feydeau's classic French farce L'Hotel du Libre Echange ("The Free-Trade Hotel") which premiered in 1894 -- and later became the basis of the Hollywood comedy Hotel Paradiso. Although I can't prove a thing here, I strongly suspect that Feydeau might have gotten the germ of his rather different idea after seeing or reading The Magistrate.
The play concerns the misadventures in the family of magistrate Posket. His wife, Agatha, falsified her age by 5 years when she married him, which forced her to pretend that her son from her earlier marriage, Cis, was five years younger than his actual age. This makes him, at the time of the play, only 14 rather than his true age of 19 -- although his behaviour from smoking and drinking to romancing his music teacher and renting a private dining room, is all too clearly not that of a 14-year old boy! This little white lie sets off a whole chain of delicious circumstances running right through the entire evening, and culminating in the moment where Agatha and their friends actually have to appear in Posket's courtroom -- and get sentenced to 7 days in jail!
Now, anybody familiar with the law would know right away that this was an impossibility -- the magistrate in such a case must recuse himself from trying the case and pass it to another. But that's the beauty of farce, you can certainly get away with such silliness as this, provided that all the characters are completely in earnest about their idiotic conduct!
As John Mortimer once wrote in his Penguin translation of three of Feydeau's farces, it's the fear of losing their precious reputations that drives his characters into their ridiculous behaviour, and the same is exactly true of this play. It was an age where reputation was everything and the loss of it would ruin you socially. The net result, again quoting Mortimer, is a classic example of farce really being "...tragedy played at 130 revolutions per minute." (By the way, I'm quoting from memory because I can't find the book in question, so please forgive me if I got it wrong!).
So, how did the National Theatre fare with this play? For my money, very well indeed. This play definitely requires team effort, and this team was universally strong. The three key members were Joshua McGuire as Cis Farringdon, Nancy Carroll as Agatha Posket, and John Lithgow (yes, that is the John Lithgow) as Posket. Each of these three did a sterling job of playing their characters with complete truthfulness, even in their most idiotic moments. As good as all of them were, I found Nancy Carroll to be the strongest of the three, with a wonderful habit of raising her volume and dropping the pitch of her voice to a throaty growl (at the same time) when she really needed to stop somebody in their tracks.
All the other performers, and there are many (total cast of 22) fitted in with similar skill and the kind of physical dexterity that is an absolute requirement of this sort of theatre. Director Timothy Sheader, in his first National Theatre production, harnessed the team at exactly the right level at all times so that the proceedings never became too pedestrian on the one hand, nor too frenetic on the other.
Not to say that the show lacked energy -- anything but that! The comic complications at the end of Act II where no less than six people hide behind or under furniture while a police inspector searches the room were hilarious fast-paced indeed!
Scene changes were very effectively bridged by comical songs in the style of Gilbert and Sullivan, definitely period-appropriate, which were composed especially for the show (one of them two nights before the opening) and delivered with precision and a great sense of style by a parallel cast of costumed "Singing Dandies".
In many ways, the real star of the show was the design behind the sets. While all the costumes and props were conventionally Victorian, the sets all reflected an impish, cartoonish distortion of the Victorian social world. Doors slanted at odd angles, walls rose higher here and lower there. The whole design was inspired by the pop-up childrens' books so popular in those days, and on the huge open stage of the Olivier Theatre it became fascinating to watch the new set rise up out of the floor as the old one folded away behind it (or vice versa) while we were enjoying the strutting and singing of the Dandies.
In sum: a first-rate production, with virtually none of the hysterical over-acting that has marred some of the other National Theatre farces I've seen. Well worth the hair-raising drive home in the snowsqualls afterwards!
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