Austin Eckert as Charles Courtly and Marissa Orjalo as Grace Harkaway in London Assurance.David Hou/Stratford Festival
- Title: London Assurance
- Written by: Dion Boucicault
- Director: Antoni Cimolino
- Actors: Deborah Hay, Geraint Wyn Davies, Austin Eckert, Marissa Orjalo
- Company: Stratford Festival
- Venue: Festival Theatre
- City: Stratford, Ont.
- Year: Runs to October 25, 2024
It takes only three words to explain why the 19th-century comedy London Assurance is still revived regularly, and why you should submit to director Antoni Cimolino’s production at the Stratford Festival this season.
Lady. Gay. Spanker.
This eccentric crop-carrying character – whose memorable name, get your mind out of the gutter, signifies how high-spirited she is and how much she enjoys getting the horses she rides to gallop as fast as possible – is the standout comedic creation in this 1841 play by Irish playwright Dion Boucicault (with assists, in this version, from two other writers).
You can’t imagine Lady Gay Spanker played by anyone with more infectious joy or unhinged horsiness than Deborah Hay – who executes one of the greatest entrances ever into the Festival Theatre, galloping on stage gleefully.
Hay, thanks to the wonders of repertory theatre, is also playing the sad-sack clown Feste on the same stage this season in Twelfth Night. It’s quite a flip from that mournful Joni Mitchell-inspired performance to this zesty one that is more like Katharine Hepburn on horse tranquilizers.
David Collins as Max Harkaway (left) and Geraint Wyn Davies as Sir Harcourt Courtly in London Assurance.David Hou/Stratford Festival
In London Assurance, Lady Gay Spanker uses all her wiles and guile to help a younger countrywoman get out a proscribed engagement to a wealthy old city fop, so that she can get with his more appropriately aged, but indebted son.
The play’s themes of city versus country, marriages for love versus marriages for money, and rich parents with poor children should be familiar to those who have been watching the non-Shakespeare classic comedies that Cimolino has directed over the last decade of his tenure as Stratford artistic director.
London Assurance follows his productions of Molière’s 1668 prose comedy The Miser, George Farquhar’s 1707 Restoration comedy The Beaux’ Stratagem and R.B. Sheridan’s 1777 comedy of manners The School for Scandal – and there are echoes of all of these in Boucicault’s play (which was originally written with John Brougham and, in the version at Stratford, has a few modern textual additions from Richard Bean).
Watching these comedies that premiered in different centuries in succession, you get the sense that the only constant in the history of gender roles and the institution of marriage is that there will always be a younger generation challenging the older generation’s norms – with the help of elder outliers such as Lady Gay Spanker who march to their own beat.
London Assurance’s young hero of sorts is Charles Courtly (Austin Eckert), a feckless city dweller who flees his debts to a country estate and assumes a new name. There, he falls for Grace Harkaway (an enchanting Marissa Orjalo), only to discover that his father, the aging fop Sir Harcourt Courtly (Geraint Wyn Davies, who could have teased more out of the bisexual character), is to marry her within days so that she can inherit her own late father’s riches.
Luckily, Sir Harcourt – who appears in a parade of enjoyably ludicrous outfits designed by Francesca Callow – is much more enchanted by Lady Gay Spanker when he meets her. This allows Spanker to get into cahoots with the young lovers, leading the vain and mannered Sir Harcourt on to believe that she will leave her husband, Adolphus Spanker (Michael Spencer-Davis), for him.
Spencer-Davis is one of great laugh-getters in this production playing Adolphus as nearly braindead until he gets some alcohol in him.
Another comic standout is Graham Abbey, who is nearly unrecognizable as a lawyer named Meddle who constantly wants to be kicked in the bottom so that he can sue for assault.
London Assurance is full of such euonyms – characters named after one of their personality traits – from a mouthy maid named Pert (Hilary Adams) to an unflappable valet named Cool (Rylan Wilkie) to a social climber named Dazzle (Emilio Vieira) who displays the London assurance a.k.a. swagger of the title. A certain two-dimensionality is baked in.
The downside of having had the incredible fortune of seeing so many classic English-language comedies is that you end up having to agree with assessments of critics that Boucicault’s play is perhaps not at the level of those that inspired him by Sheridan and Farquhar.
The characters’ asides in particular feel mannered; in this production, in any case, Abbey is the only actor who seemed to actually connect with the audience during them on opening night.
But even this is interesting from a dramatic history point of view: London Assurance feels like the last gasp of acknowledging the audience before the fourth wall descended and realism and naturalism come on the scene in the second half of the 19th century. Wilde and his Bunburying characters are on the way.