BILL BRAY warns: Watch out! Here she comes again! Another visit from the much-loved Mrs Malaprop
It isn't the first time she has been seen on the GWT stage and I'm sure that it won't be the last. Her re-appearance is a mark of her popularity with audiences and the affection with which she is held as a character.
It is of Mrs Malaprop I write. Like Falstaff (such a popular character that Shakespeare put him in Henry IV, Parts 1 and 2 and the Merry Wives of Windsor and he even has an off-stage part in Henry V), Willie Loman (in Arthur Miller's Death Of A Salesman) and Blanche Dubois (in Tennessee Williams' A Streetcar Named Desire), she has achieved a life well beyond the play in which she appears. Her name has entered the language to describe the particular way she tortures her vocabulary. Here is a chance to enjoy that exquisite torture as she flounders her way, mercilessly, through her misapplied meanings.
Sheridan didn't invent the lady, however, but borrowed the character from an unperformed play, A Trip to Bath, written by his mother, who had died when her son was only 14.
Sir Lucius O'Trigger was taken from a play by his father and the main plot of The Rivals is, in part, a re-hash of Sheridan's own life. At only 23, when the play was first performed at Covent Garden, Sheridan had already gained notoriety for his colourful life, with love affairs, duels, marriage and a judgemental father all part of his short, but turbulent history.
Although the first performance was given anonymously, most of fashionable London was aware that the author was Richard Brinsley Sheridan, scion of a theatrical Irish family, his father being an actor, Dublin theatre manager and playwright.
The events of his busy life were so rich that Sheridan cleverly split himself and his spouse into four characters, with Lydia and Julia both being reflections of his wife, Eliza, while Jack Absolute and Faulkland were both based on himself. All aspects of his love affair were shown in this double pairing. Now married to Eliza, Richard could afford to find comedy in earlier happenings that might well have had serious consequences, including possible death in his real-life duel.
There is some invention of things, making them as he wished they might have been, so that Lydia is a wealthy heiress, Sir Anthony Absolute forgives his son and the sabre-rattling is all in fun.
Thomas Harris, manager of the Covent Garden Theatre, requested that Sheridan should write the play for him and, when its first performance was not successful, suggested that it should be revised and re-cast. It reopened a fortnight later to meet with more favourable opinion and has remained a favourite comedy of the British theatre.
Sheridan wrote several other plays, including The School for Scandal, but gave up writing plays for a career in politics and became a Member of Parliament. The theatre still gave him a living as manager of the Theatre Royal, Drury Lane, but when it burnt down in 1809 he was financially ruined and died in 1816.
His plays, of course, live on.
Georgian Bath, the sedate Las Vegas of the 18th century
The City of Bath was the place to be, the place to see and be seen. Gambling, flirting, doing business, match-making, social climbing and recuperating were the planned occupations, the results including money-making, marriage, adultery, bankruptcy and gluttony; truly a Las Vegas, with no equivalent in present-day Britain (although there are plans for a down-market version in Blackpool).
By the late 17th century the profits of empire and developing industry and agriculture had given rise to a sizable English gentry and an enriched landed aristocracy. With wealth derived from wheat, wool, coal, sugar and slavery came leisure, and with leisure came the pursuits of conversation and politesse practiced in coffee houses, salons and dining rooms. No better place for polite society to converge, converse, connive and court than the City of Bath during the "season", that is, the winter months.
Those who could afford to do so - and many who could not - decamped from London or their country estates, renting a house in The Circus, or North Parade, or The Royal Crescent, taking their servants, jewels, best clothes and special pieces of furniture.
Just as the Prince Regent gave the royal stamp of approval to Brighton a hundred years or so later, Queen Ann gave her blessing to Bath when she visited for "the cure" in 1702. The town was then a small provincial centre of the burgeoning woollen industry, standing on Britain's only natural hot springs, around which the Romans had erected fountains and baths, which had become neglected and almost forgotten during the intervening dozen centuries when personal hygiene was considered unnecessary and effete.
Queen Anne started a growing fashion, which received another boost in the 1730s when Frederick and Augusta, the Prince and Princess of Wales were regulars. The rich and aspiring were inevitably followed by the essential hangers-on: money-lenders, pretenders, actors, prostitutes and - the lowest of the low - property developers. As foundations for new houses were dug, Roman remains were found all over the town, but it was not until the mid-19th century that the city fathers appreciated the tourist value of these ancient stones and encouraged the archaeologists to unearth and restore.
It was John Wood, son of a local builder, who dreamed of re-creating the Roman Baths and building a matching city around them. At the age of 17 he went to London, where he made valuable contacts among the rich, his passport probably being freemasonry. Some of his high-class friends had speculatively acquired land in Bath and he encouraged them to allow him to build. His first commission fell through even before work started. Undaunted he leased land himself and started to build in 1727, a year later starting on the glorious Queen's Square.
Wood's architectural inspiration was Rome, a place he never visited. From books he learned of Doric, Ionian and Corinthian features and copied them in his buildings, which were constructed using the honey-coloured limestone from local quarries.
His creation is the jewel of all British cities, rightly designated a World Heritage Site by UNESCO in 1987.
The social centre of Georgian Bath was the Pump Room, where one could drink the sulphurous waters, as well as more appealing beverages, promenade, attend the ball of an evening and meet all the right people.
Sheridan removed with his family to Bath in 1770, when he was 19 years old. There he met Miss Linley, a beautiful girl of 16 of whom he was not the only suitor. In order to thwart his rivals Sheridan eloped with the girl to France, secretly marrying her. He returned to England and fought two duels with the most persistent of his wife's followers, creating a considerable sensation at the time. Once he had opted for the law and was accepted at the Middle Temple he openly married Miss Linley in 1773. Thus we see some autobiographical elements in The Rivals.
Sheridan would have been well-versed in the niceties of the Bath season. Richard 'Beau' Nash had set the rules, having become master of ceremonies at Bath in 1704. Nash declared that it would be unfitting for a gentleman to carry pistols or swords on the street and accordingly, Captain Absolute, in The Rivals, declares: "A sword seen on the streets of Bath would raise as great alarm as a mad dog."
On entering a house, or the Pump Room, a gentleman would remove his muddy boots, for none of the streets was paved. All necessary delicacies were observed. The up-to-date drawing room and dining room had a cupboard, in which to secrete the chamber pot, and a corner screen to which one could discreetly withdraw. Ladies had little difficulty because this was before any but tarts wore knickers and the voluminous skirts preserved one's modesty.
When to see and be seen were the main daily occupations there was a continuum between public and private spaces: the Pump Room, the streets, the gardens and the genteel salons.
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