FringeReview UK 2024

The English Moor

Shakespeare’s Globe

Genre: Adaptation, Classical and Shakespeare, Comedy, Contemporary, Drama, Historical, Lecture, Mainstream Theatre, New Writing, Political, Short Plays, Talk, Theatre

Venue: Wanamaker Globe, Shakespeare’s Globe

Festival: FringeReview UK

Low Down

Review

Richard Brome’s 1637 The English Moor marks a new departure for Read Not Dead. You might say with this play it’s Read to be Dead.

Not one for revival. Directed by Steven Kavuma, it’s dramaturged by Zoe Svendsen with a panel including the play’s PhD specialist Lily Valentine and post-show discussion chaired by Professor Farah Karim-Cooper.

Previously companies under the overall supervision of Patrick Spottiswoode worked on a script, met to rehearse in six hours. Then script in hand on a Sunday at 4pm, they’d perform. That held from 1995 till 2020’s pandemic.

Not one for revival. Directed by Steven Kavuma, it’s dramaturged by Zoe Svendsen with a panel including the play’s PhD specialist Lily Valentine and post-show discussion chaired by Professor Farah Karim-Cooper.

Previously companies under the overall supervision of Patrick Spottiswoode worked on a script, met to rehearse in six hours. Then script in hand on a Sunday at 4pm, they’d perform. That held from 1995 till 2020’s pandemic.

Introduction to a Problematic Text

Karim-Cooper invites a different conversation. A play extolling blackface not only enacting misogynoir but so two white women are mistaken for each other, is merely the core conceit.

Brome (1590-1652) was a workaholic “son of Ben” Jonson, literally his servant, then secretary. Tragedy wasn’t his bent: more rough Jonsonian humours, without enough Jonsonian wit, let alone Jonson’s taste.

The 1630s clearly enjoyed plays that disdained race, gender, ability and disability. Of course it stormed audiences. We need a lens refracting 1637; but also a camera obscura to judge how it affects us. How its core prejudices are constants to confront now: only here it’s blatant.

As Svendsen pointed out, it’s common to encounter racism in early modern drama. Or sexism. But the full intersectional experience of what Brome’s text offers is – happily- rare.

Actor Philip Bird, added that at an Atlanta University webinar, he encountered a useful formula: four modes to tackle offensive texts. One, read it through regardless. Two, cut it. Three frame it with explanations to an audience. Four, perform it and have other actors pull each other up. There’s a few props including a paint-pot.

That’s how it’s performed here, but there’s plenty of framing too. As Bird added, actors must “let the play’s words bloom too”, on their own terms. Then reflect.

Framing Brome

The ‘comedy’ as it stands challenges us. The fallout of this production is rendering a new comedy as palimpsest over the old: ironising, lacing it in quotes to thrust it to 21^st-century references whilst allowing it some story-telling agency.

Often acting as chorus the five actors in turn deploy contemporary critical terms with a flick of a wrist or looks of deadpan irony. Switching in and out of centuries, they’re all superb.

Thus none of the original breathes without a narrative interpolation or, often, Facebook or Instagram being referenced. As an update 400 years on – and look how far we haven’t come is a watchword – this is no attempt on updating. Rather it cauterises, fillets deconstruction.

Svendsen and Kavuma have created with the cast a platform of extracts, aerated by references to Andrew Tate and Russell Brand through to Kim Kardashian. The company render this with phenomenal panache: dashes of critical theory are off the page.

The Play

The plot’s complex but  dispensed with wittily. Like Edmund Kean we see it by strokes of lightning, constraining misogyny, misogynoir, racism, ableism, sexism, class war and anti-Semitic references.

It centres round attempts of old financier Quick or Quicksands (Philip Bird) to disguise new wife Millicent (Holly Cattle) from rakes, and with whom he’s not consummated his marriage. Millicent’s contrived to avert it as long as possible with apparent sexual voracity. Quick blackfaces Millicent: she responds by swapping with seduced lady Phyllis Meanwell, who wants her seducer Nathaniel back; who’s after Millicent. Nathaniel and two other rakes intend to cuckold Quick. Who’s a portrait in anti-Semitism. I’m cutting subplots here!

Though Nathaniel makes for Millicent she swaps with scorned genteel Phyllis, so Millie can marry Theophilus and Phyllis, Nathaniel. Millicent’s penile joke of an uncle, Justice Testy (Dolly Webb) who forcibly married her to Quick, ends up deus ex machina.

The play’s frame is that three men (Winloss, Rashly, Meanwell) are missing before the play starts. Spoiler: they reappear. Two are thought to have killed each other in a duel and each have a son and daughter who seek vengeance differently. Winloss has a daughter too.

Two respond with patience, Arthur Meanwell (Obadiah) in love with Lucy Rashly. Or more violently: Arthur’s sister Dionisia Meanwell (Holly Cattle) “of violent spirit” who cross-dresses but is chastised for it, chases Theophilus Rashly and goes nowhere but to dwindle for a husband.

Like Dionisia, Theophilus Rashly’s of violent temper and wants to kill Arthur (who quietly does him a service) but is able to retrieve his original fiancée Millicent Testy-Quick before she can be forced to consummate that marriage.

Phyllis Winloss (Dolly Webb) seduced and abandoned by said rake Nathaniel Banelasse (Joseph Clark, speaking out of his character to comment on his vile persona) now tricks him with Millicent’s help: both in blackface can swap and “witty” Phyllis gets her man like Helena does Bertram in All’s Well. Misogynoir layers over misogyny. Phyllis’s wit goes for nothing but contrivance.

Abelism’s suppled by a fake illegitimate ”changeling” son of Quick, Buzzard, Cattle invoking comic actor Timothy Read who created him. Disguised Cattle/Read/Buzzard litanises “Toodle, loodle, loo” as skirling refrain. Buzzard’s appearance shames Quick to agreeing to cancel all debts and allow Millicent to marry properly. And undertake penance, like Shylock.

Academic Optimism

Also discussed in this London-specific play is the increasing presence of Black individuals during the 1620s and 30s. Indeed some might have come to the play. It’s paradoxical but suggests how Jacobean ‘exoticism’ became perceived as incipient threat.

In ‘The English Moor and the Black Briton’ Brome’s editor of this play, Matthew Steggle (Royal Holloway) frames the play with startling but considered optimism:  “Existing as an interlude between the progressive negative black markings of the Elizabethan period and those of the later seventeenth century…. a brief moment of brightness.” He invokes Imtiaz Habib’s loss of “Black renaissance of earlier seventeenth-century England”, how slavery crushed this.

Steggle concludes that Brome’s uncharacteristically experimental work registers “the thinking machine of Caroline England.” Valentine’s response which doubtless engages with such assertions, will be welome!

Brome Now

Brome’s loose writing, which as Svendsen and Karim-Cooper point out, jars enough for newly-applied disruptions to seem quite harmonious, is a text whose discontinuities only add to the disdain with which human consequences are imagined. Brome had ability and contrivance. Here though, he seems poised on an age where framing conventions of empire and comporting yourself to early capitalism start turning rigid.

The post-show discussion was a stimulating de-brief of 30 minutes after a 45-minute kaleidoscope of something we’re happy to see, and happily never again.

It wasn’t thrown open to the room but the discussion’s keynote of 400 years of patriarchal racism, misogyny and empire is worth exploring.

Returning to texts like Lyly’s gender-fluid Galatea or Sappho and Phao, and others of the late 1580s-1590s, one can’t help wondering: not of some facile decay of sensibility that T.S. Eliot too quickly noted in playwrights like Massinger: but a parallel closing-down of possibility, or rigid gender and race roles. The Restoration reopened freedoms, but differently. Brome’s late Caroline text begs more questions than we could explore here. Valentine’s dissertation will be rewarding.

Published May 17, 2024 by Simon Jenner