The Tragedy of Ina

After Samuel Taylor Coleridge’s verse tragedy Remorse became a hit in 1813, many writers with literary ambitions turned to the stage, hoping to repeat the poet's success.

One of them, Barbarina Wilmot, had her play Ina premiered at the Theatre Royal, Drury Lane in 1815. In the first scene, the Mercian princess Edelfleda’s maid Bertha even cries out, “Oh heaven! thou speak’st as tho’ remorse / Had stung thy bosom.”

Edelfleda counters that remorse more rightfully belongs to the man who has wronged her, Prince Egbert of Wessex, who was engaged to Edelfleda by his father in order to secure peace with Mercia. However, he is actually in love with Ina, Edelfleda’s beloved friend.

For his part, Egbert thinks of Edelfleda as a sister, while he is passionately in love with Ina, the orphan daughter of a warrior who died saving the king. That king, Egbert’s father Cenulph, decides to resolve the quandary by sending his son off to war defending the kingdom’s border, but Egbert instead flees with Ina.

Act II begins with Egbert brought back to his father, who reprimands him for placing himself above the good of his people. The problem is that Egbert and Ina have not only been secretly married already, but they even have a child together. Edelfleda leaves in a passion, declaring she will have vengeance. When the Mercian forces invade, Cenulph has little choice but to allow his son to lead an army against them.

In the following act, Edelfleda goes to Ina and tells her that Egbert has been imprisoned and placed in chains. This was briefly true, but is no longer, as becomes apparent when Egbert himself arrives. Thwarted, Edelfleda leaves, quietly vowing Ina’s death. Alwyn, the king’s faithful retainer, arrives and offers to take Ina and her child to safety as Egbert goes off to war. All of them are aware of the dangers present at court, not just from Edelfleda but also from the monk Baldred, who was once himself in love with Ina. 

Indeed, Baldred captures Ina and in the next act brings her to trial for treason. The trial scene allows Ina, who was originally played by Sarah Smith Bartley, to shine in her own defense, but it is in vain, and she is sentenced to death. In the final act, she appeals to the king and escapes her execution, but Egbert, returning to her home, finds her gone and expects the worst. Just before he kills himself, Ina returns, and the play has a happy ending, depriving the actor who plays Egbert of a death scene.

Who was that actor originally? It was none other than Edmund Kean, an otherwise brilliant performer who ended up giving such a weak portrayal of Egbert that the play was only presented at Drury Lane for a single night. Reviewers praised Julia Glover as Edelfleda, but she was unable to carry the show.

Is there a lesson here? Perhaps it's to always give your leading actor a juicy death scene, at least if your leading actor happens to be Edmund Kean.

Kean, Dumas, Sartre

Edmund Kean has been called the greatest actor of the Romantic era, perhaps even the greatest actor of all time. (Kean wouldn't disagree with that.) However, his genius also attracted other geniuses, and he became the subject of a play by Alexandre Dumas that was later adapted for the 20th-century stage by Jean-Paul Sartre.

Dumas's play Kean is a comedy, while the actual Kean's life was more of a tragedy. (Like Molière, he collapsed onstage and subsequently died.) The play premiered in 1836--just three years after Kean's death--at the Théâtre des Variétés in Paris. No mention of the actor's famous death is made in the piece, as Dumas's play ends happily. It originally starred Frédérick Lemaître in the title role. Lemaître was a highly respected performer, and would go on to originate another title role in Victor Hugo's play Ruy Blas.

The play opens at a society soirée attended by the Danish ambassador and his wife, Elena, who is rumored to be in love with Edmund Kean. The fact is Kean had many lovers, but I'm not familiar with his ever being linked with the wife of a Danish ambassador. It hardly matters, since the scene is an excuse for Kean to at first decline an invitation to the party, and then show up and make a brilliant speech, entreating Elena to read aloud a letter. He then quietly asks her to flip the letter over and read the other side, which is an invitation to a private assignation with him.

Act II takes place in Kean's chambers. (In Sartre's adaptation, it's explicitly his dressing room at the theatre.) Dumas's stage directions state: "Au lever du rideau, le théâtre présente toutes les traces d’une orgie." (As the curtain rises, the theatre presents all the signs of an orgy.) A woman arrives in disguise, but it's not Elena, rather another woman, Anna, who wants to learn acting from Kean.

The third act takes place at the tavern of Peter Patt, which is called the Black Horse in Sartre's adaptation. This might be based on the Coal Hole, a pub Kean frequented with the members of his infamous Wolves Club. Kean agrees to act the role of Romeo at a benefit for a performer down on his luck. Kean was considered weak in that part, so Sartre changed it to Othello.

The performance is a disaster and causes a scandal which Kean is only extricated from by Anna. The French versions of Kean's life--both Dumas's and Sartre's--are historically inaccurate and leave out his wife Mary and son Charles. Still, they are a great deal of fun.

Remorse and Shakespeare

I previously blogged about theatre articles that appeared recently in The Byron Journal. Today, I want to write about an article in The Coleridge Bulletin.

Samuel Taylor Coleridge is best known today as a poet, but by his own account, he made more money off of his verse drama Remorse than all of his other poetry combined.

Dominik Laciak wrote an article called "Coleridge's Remorse and the Haunting Shadow of Shakespeare" which argues that Coleridge's playwriting and Shakespeare criticism informed one another, which definitely makes sense. Remorse opened at Drury Lane in January of 1813, and throughout the rehearsal process Coleridge was also delivering lectures on Shakespeare.

Laciak concentrates on three Shakespeare villains who likely influenced the character of Ordonio in Remorse: Macbeth, Richard III, and Iago. Like Macbeth, Ordonio feels guilt but tries to pretend that he doesn't. Like Richard III, he is constantly posturing. Like Iago, he takes pride in his intellect.

I wrote about Remorse in my book Romantic Actors, Romantic Dramas. It's nice to see other scholars writing about the play as well.

Byron's Dramas

Today is the birthday of novelist Mary Shelley, but I want to write about the plays of one of her associates, George Gordon Byron, who remained a close friend and colleague of hers until his death in 1824.

While Byron is today known mainly as a poet, the latest issue of The Byron Journal has a couple of articles addressing his dramas Cain and Manfred. Both plays are verse dramas that Byron protested (perhaps too much, methinks) were not intended for the stage, but then they got performed over and over again anyway.

In "Byron in Space" Anthony Howe of Birmingham City University takes a look at cosmology in Cain as well as Byron's mock-epic poem Don Juan. While earlier poets like John Milton could invoke the Ptolemaic universe at least somewhat seriously, that was not the case for Byron in the 19th century. Act II of Cain shows Lucifer taking the title character to "The Abyss of Space" and asking him to point out the Earth. Cain responds:

                                                        As we move

    Like sunbeams onward, it grows small and smaller,

    And as it waxes little, and then less,

    Gathers a halo round it, like the light

    Which shone the roundest of the stars, when I

    Beheld them from the skirts of Paradise...

Howe notes how Cain becomes lost in the vastness of space. He seems to suffer from the pain of the Copernican revolution, no longer able to count on the Earth being a fixed point. Interestingly, though, the cosmos he sees still has elements of the Ptolemaic model of the universe, including not just "ether" also a heaven that is a "blue wilderness" postulated by earlier astronomers who thought the sky only grew dark when the Earth's shadow passed over it.

Flora Lisica of Northeastern University London speculates in "Byron's Manfred and Tragedy in the 'Mental Theatre'" that the tragedies of Byron achieve their greatest intimacy when read. Curiously, she does not include Heaven and Earth with the tragic plays Byron had published. (The play is a sort of sequel to his earlier drama Cain.) However, she does remind readers of the advice--traced back to Roman drama--that Byron gives in his poem Hints from Horace:

    Yet many deeds preserved in history's page

    Are better told than acted on the stage;

    The ear sustains what shocks the timid eye,

    And horror thus subsides to sympathy...

Later in the article, Lisica quotes from one of Byron's letters he wrote after seeing Barbarina Wilmot's tragedy Ina, which failed at Drury Lane, probably due to the half-hearted acting of Edmund Kean. Byron lamented Kean's poor performance, and the fact that the epilogue recited by Sarah Bartley could hardly be heard. Alas, the play bombed, in spite of fine performances by Alexander Rae as the villainous monk Baldred and Julia Glover as Princess Edelfleda.

Perhaps it was the fear of failing with a play like Ina that made Byron turn inward when writing Manfred, creating a deeply introspective work. In any case, I enjoyed reading both articles and look forward to the next issue of The Byron Journal when it arrives.

Shaw and Cocteau

The latest issue of The Shavian has a fascinating article by Michel Pharand about links between the dramatists Bernard Shaw and Jean Cocteau.

I know Cocteau primarily as the author of the play The Infernal Machine, which reworks the Oedipus myth. Back in the 1990s, his later play Les Parents Terribles became quite popular in a new translation by Jeremy Sams called Indiscretions.

However, as Pharand observes, Cocteau also designed costumes for a Broadway revival of Shaw's Candida in 1946. That play starred Katherine Cornell in the title role, but also included as Marchbanks the then-unknown actor Marlon Brando.

Brando ended up receiving a Theatre World Award for his performance, launching his stage career. Though he is now more famous as a film actor, his last performance on stage was in another Shaw play, Arms and the Man, in 1953.

Another connection the article notes between Cocteau and Shaw is that Cocteau translated into French the Jerome Kilty play Dear Liar, which I just saw at the Shaw Festival in Niagara-on-the-Lake. The play explores through letters the complex relationship between Shaw and the actress Pat Campbell, who first brought to life the role of Eliza Doolittle on the British stage in the London premiere of Pygmalion.

Cocteau's French version of Dear Liar opened in 1960. The following year, Cocteau wrote a preface for a translation of Shaw and Campbell's letters. Pharand provides in the article a translation of this preface, which includes the line: "Like many famous vegetarians, Shaw ate humans."

Many thanks to Pharand, author of the indispensable book Bernard Shaw and the French, for an enlightening and amusing article!

Tom Taylor's Two Cities

The British dramatist Tom Taylor is most famous for writing Our American Cousin, the comedy Abraham Lincoln was watching when he was assassinated.

However, Taylor also wrote the first adaptation of the Charles Dickens novel A Tale of Two Cities to be staged in London after the book was finished. (Adaptations of some other Dickens novels, such as Nicholas Nickleby, were sometimes staged even before the book was completed, when it was still coming out in installments.)

Taylor's adaptation begins with a prologue in 1762, in which the audience sees events that are only narrated in a document that appears much later in the book. Doctor Manette (originally played by James Vining) is summoned to an old house outside of Paris where he meets the Marquis of St. Evremond (Walter Lacy) and his disgraceful younger brother.

Both Manette and the Marquis show up again later in the play, somewhat older, but portrayed by the same actors in the original production. What I find interesting is that the actor playing the Marquis's brother then doubled as that character's son, Charles Darnay. An innocent victim of the aristocrats, Colette Dubois, was played by the famous actress Madame Celeste, who reappeared later as Colette's sister, the vengeful Madame Defarge.

Celeste was the manager of the Lyceum Theatre, where Taylor's play was first performed on January 30, 1860. According to publicity for the show, Dickens himself "in the kindest manner superintended the production." How much of a role Dickens actually played, I'm not sure, but Taylor definitely takes considerable liberties with the source material.

The first act shows Manette "recalled to life" in 1783, not 1775, as in the novel. The second act shows the height of the French Revolution in 1793, where Sydney Carton delivers his famous line about "a far, far better thing" while still imprisoned, not from the scaffold.

Still, the adaptation hits many of the high points in the book, even though it irons out a lot of its complexities and ambiguities.

Sunday in the Park with George

I’ve been visiting friends in Pittsburgh, and last night I had the opportunity to see Front Porch Theatricals’ production of Sunday in the Park with George at the New Hazlett Center for Performing Arts.

The New Hazlett doesn’t have the fly space to make set pieces entirely disappear like in the original production of this classic musical. The theatre also didn’t have the high-resolution projections used for technical wizardry in the more recent Broadway revival. However, director Rob James came up with some creative solutions to perform theatrical magic with the resources he had available.

Much of the credit probably belongs to scenic designer Johnmichael Bohach. In his versatile set, the tree frequently alluded to in the first act becomes part of the 20th-century art installation in the second before transforming back into a tree, all with help from an illuminating lighting design provided by Forrest Trimble. The costumes designed by Michelle Nowakowski elegantly evoke both the 1880s and the 1980s without feeling forced. (This was a welcome change from the Broadway revival which telegraphed the 1980s rather than portraying them authentically.)

All in all, I actually preferred this production to the Broadway revival with all its technical marvels. Saige Smith found a way to play Dot with charm and originality, but without constantly reminding us of Bernadette Peters, who not only originated the role but made it almost fully her own. Aaron Galligan-Stierle gave a colorful performance as George, making the artist fascinating to watch even as he makes questionable choices.

Stephen Sondheim deservedly receives credit for his magnificent music and lyrics in the piece, but James Lapine’s book is also a model for dialogue that’s both deeply emotional and surprisingly economical. Just a few lines can make a character come to life when played by a skilled actor, as Ben Nadler showed with the small role of Dennis, and Adelyne Anderson showed with the even smaller role of Elaine.

This production is running until August 24th. Many performances are selling out, so see it if you can. It’s a reminder that some of the best theatre in America is being done far outside of New York City.