Panel 4: Learning from Rehearsal and Production
2:15-3:30PM | Sophie Tomlinson (Auckland)
Erin Julian (Co-Dramaturge), ‘“Our hurtless mirth”: What’s Funny about The Dutch Courtesan?’
Julian’s presentation outlined her continuing preoccupation with how humour works in The Dutch Courtesan. Julian cited her initial contact with the play in the context of work on sexual violence, particularly early modern laws that failed to protect sex workers from verbal abuse and physical and sexual assault. Working on the Toronto Dutch Courtesan Julian was fascinated by how funny the play really was on its feet, but also troubled by the extent to which its humour is grounded in violence – violence towards outsiders, violence towards sex workers, violence towards even Freevill’s friends and partners. The play asks us to think about why and how violence is funny.
Julian located part our ability to laugh at violence in Marston’s play in the fact that a good deal of that violence – particularly in the Mulligrub-Cockledemoy scenes – is done in the spirit of clowns or cartoons, where no permanent harm occurs. In the Toronto Dutch Courtesan, it was hard to feel too sorry for Adam Bererique’s Mulligrub. Belerique, who reads as a cis white man, was also one of the tallest figures on the stage. He brilliantly captured the irrepressible spirit of the foolish clown, responding to Cockledemoy’s humiliations with a comically exaggerated rage. After his shaving, he tore off his apron, and stomped around the stage, his face still covered in shaving cream, raising his fists and his voice to the heavens in an impotent rage. He rapidly shifted between extreme moods throughout the production, from a forced calm, to delight, to rage, to regretful tears with such ease and ridiculousness that he invariably won the audience’s laughter. When he is brought to the scaffolding in act 5 it’s hard to believe that he won’t bounce back from that situation as well.
But Julian also drew parallels between Mulligrub and Malheureux, who in the Toronto production grew increasingly anxious and miserable as he was caught in Freevill’s manipulative schemes. George Worrall played Malheureux with a charming naivety and emotional earnestness that made his desperation at being wrongfully arrested for Freevill’s murder funny. His performance also elicited anxiety, however; Worrall responded to Freevill’s gallows revelation that he faked his death to get Malheureux falsely arrested in order to teach him a lesson with a disturbed silence that continued during the scene’s happy reunions. Julian identified the pattern of humour in this production as one where laughter becomes increasingly anxious until it shatters into silence. Franceschina’s grim final lines ‘torture, torture your fill / Me am worse than hanged, me hath lost my will’ follow this same arc.
Noam Lior (Director), ‘Performing the City: Marston’s London 1605 and Toronto 2019’
Lior’s presentation focused disparate conversations held over the course of our conference through the lens of what he had learned from directing The Dutch Courtesan. He shared his increasing interest in the play’s commentary on how adult masculinity is shaped in adolescence. As a boy’s play, The Dutch Courtesan is a particularly adept vehicle for exploring this problem. When Malheureux becomes distressed and overwhelmed by unwanted lust (signified in the Toronto production by an unwanted erection) the play astutely picks up on the pain of adolescence, a period when things happen to one’s body and emotions that cannot be controlled. Boys in particular – in our own culture still – are given very little instruction about how to navigate this or their incipient masculine adulthood.
Lior also returned us to our ongoing discussions about Beatrice. In the Toronto production, the cast sought to play her patience as strength rather than as parody. One of the hardest moments to pull off is Beatrice’s forgiveness of Freevill – he and the cast seriously considered whether we wanted to invite the audience to feel happy that Freevill and Beatrice end up together. In the Toronto Dutch Courtesan, Carmen Kruk played Beatrice in the final scene as though she had finally decided to join her sister and Freevill in the spirit of city comedy games: she took great delight in exaggeratedly dipping and kissing Freevill (still disguised as ‘Don Dubon’) in front of Tysefew, giving no explanation for her seemingly bewildering shift from suicidal mourning to glee and sexual delight. Kruk also located in that moment the relief the genuinely grief-stricken Beatrice must have felt at discovering Freevill is alive after all; some of the joyful feeling the audience experiences at watching the pair reunite depends on being sympathetic to her pain and then sharing in her relief (we can experience these feelings without fully buying into her devotion to Freevill).
Lior finally told us that in the modern production set in a world recognizably our own, he was constantly asking: what is it okay to laugh at? What sort of audience response are we looking for if not laughter? How do we know if the production succeeds in convincing the audience to recognise the depressingly recognizable patterns of misogyny and xenophobia? Lior ultimately wanted to offer his audiences a production that resisted any easy answers.