Review of Mary Pixs the Beau Defeated (1700), the Different Widows (1703), and the Spanish Wives (1696), by Bridge Theatre Company, Directed
Restoration and Eighteenth-Century Theatre Research, Dec 1, 2013
Review of Mary Pixs The Beau Defeated (1700), The Different Widows (1703), and The Spanish Wives ... more Review of Mary Pixs The Beau Defeated (1700), The Different Widows (1703), and The Spanish Wives (1696), by Bridge Theatre Company, directed by Alison Sutcliffe, London, August 20-22, 2014.Wilton's Music Hall in London was the unlikely venue for three nights of "script-in-hand" performances of comedies by Mary Pix. A new company, Bridge Theatre, is currently working on plays by women writers of the late Restoration and early Georgian period, cutting and editing the texts and staging them to be accessible for twenty-first-century audiences.Wilton's Music Hall is located in the east end of London on the site of an eighteenth-century alehouse which was converted to a music hall accommodating 1500 people in the nineteenth century. It resembles a combination of warehouse, barn, church, and theatre, in a state of disrepair but destined for continued restoration. The stage consists of two levels, without proscenium arch or curtains. The performances of Pix's works took place on the lower stage with the upper used as a backstage and storage area for props and costumes-including scattered wigs and a rusty full-length mirror. The stage furniture comprised a chaise longue, a screen, a large wicker costume basket, and a small table with chairs. Imaginative use was made of these minimal pieces for the intrigues, hidings, overhearings, and donning of wigs for character changes. Actors wore items of modern dress-from charity shops-which gave hints of period and character. The worthy Lady Landsworth in The Beau Defeated wore woollen gray stockings, the fop Sir John Roverhead an elaborate black wig, and the gormless servant Vermin a tightly fitting woollen hat. At one moment a simple prop was unfortunately lacking, when Lady Courtall in The Different Widows suspected her husband had been at Lady Gaylove's, by identifying his hat on a chair: (aside) "I see the Hat, and want no other Proof." The chair that should have held the hat was empty.The plays were each framed by scenes introducing Mary Pix as Mrs Wellfed, rehearsing her actors, enjoying her favorite morning tipple of sherry, deriding coffee lovers, and disputing with the principal actress. Each play ended with the same Spanish dance, presumably devised for the final play, The Spanish Wives. A keyboard with harpsichord stop was used to provide appropriate music and to accompany the songs sung mellifluously by Andrew Piper as Sir John Roverhead in The Beau Defeated and as Mr Leveridge (Richard Leveridge, Pix's singer/composer) in The Spanish Wives, in duet with Dani Carbery as Mrs Cross (Letitia Cross, contemporary singer and actress). The company composer, Corin Buckeridge, to whom "Mrs Wellfed" paid tribute, provided romantic songs with an early eighteenth-century flavor.Mary Pix was one of the three women dramatists who benefited from the creation of a new company at Lincoln's Inn Fields in 1697 by the need for new repertoire to perform there. She was more gently satirized than her sister dramatists Catherine Trotter and Delarivier Manley, in the anonymous play The Female Wits, because she was not as aggressively feminist. She was depicted as Mrs Wellfed, an overweight woman who enjoyed her food and wine. Daughter of a clergyman, she married a merchant tailor, wrote tragedies and comedies, and critics from John Genest to the present day regard her as more skilled at comedies. Jane Milling considers her to be the "most theatrically alert" of the three women (125). Pix's plays are populated with disorderly women: "active female grotesques, monstrous mothers, faithless wives and lustful widows" (Pearson 174) and typically of Restoration comedy her characters' names reflect their function, or are ludicrous terms of endearment (e.g., Vermin, Sir John Roverhead, Mrs Trickwell, Dandle, Hearty, Mrs Rich, Tittup). Elizabeth Kubek considers Pix's work political, portraying heroic reforming maternity, showing the economic power wielded by women in "a progressive society" (88-89). …
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