Beaux and Belles
A few years ago I met Tappan Wilder, Thornton Wilder’s nephew and literary executor, and he asked if I would be interested in completing The Beaux’ Stratagem.
“What a nice man,” I thought, “but clearly the dear fellow has been reading too much fine print because he seems to have lost his marbles.”
As lovers of English comedy know, The Beaux’ Stratagem is a minor classic written by George Farquhar in 1707. Farquhar was a very fine playwright who wrote several comedies in the first decade of the 18th century, including not one but two minor classics: The Recruiting Officer (which is being revived at the moment by the Donmar Warehouse in London), and The Beaux’ Stratagem (his final play, written in the year of his death, 1707, when he was 29).
Farquhar had a wonderful knack for writing fully-realized comic characters and witty dialogue. He is particularly known for taking comedy out of the drawing room and moving it to the countryside where it could be breathe more deeply than it did in earlier Restoration comedies like Etherege’s The Man of Mode and Congreve’s The Way of the World.
So why was Tappan Wilder asking me to “finish” a play that was already finished and was written over 300 years ago?
The answer is that Thornton Wilder, about mid-way through his career, decided to write an adaptation of The Beaux Stratagem for modern audiences. He got about halfway through it and abandoned it for reasons unknown, and Tappy was asking me to finish the adaptation so that modern audiences could once again enjoy the genius of both Farquhar and Wilder.
Genius is the right word because both men were extraordinary writers. In particular, I was struck from the first by Wilder’s choice of The Beaux’ Stratagem as a vehicle for revisiting 18th century English stage comedy, and this for two reasons:
First, the whole idea of doing a modern stage adaptation of an 18th century play in English is remarkable. Think about it. Playwrights do adaptations all the time; but the word adaptation implies that the source material is either written in a different language or comes from a different medium than the finished product. Thus there are loads of English-language adaptations of Moliere plays because the originals are in French. Ditto the plays of Goldoni (Italian), Schiller (German), Chekhov (Russian), and Ibsen (Norwegian). Also, there are loads of theatrical adaptations of works in English that originated in different media, such as novels (Austen’s Pride and Prejudice), stories (James’s The Turn of the Screw) and movies (The Graduate). Indeed, Broadway musicals are usually based on English-language originals, but always from different media, e.g. Hairspray (based on a film), and Guys and Dolls (based on a short story). But why on earth do a stage adaptation of a play that is already in English and is considered by many people a minor classic?
The answer is that Wilder could see deeper and farther than the rest of us. He recognized that The Beaux’ Stratagem was a kind of masterpiece, but he also knew that it was rarely performed, even in England. It might be a minor classic, but it was an unperformed minor classic, and Wilder felt he should fix that.
The fact of the matter is that The Beaux’ Stratagem as written by Farquhar has a remarkable plot, terrific, joyful characters, some wonderful lines, and a kind of genial insouciance that makes it feel like a romantic comedy in the best sense (as in Much Ado About Nothing or The Taming of the Shrew). Looking at Farquhar’s body of work, he clearly understood the beauty of great comic architecture. He understood the form and the conventions of comedy in a way that was remarkable for a man in his 20s. His writing was full of wit, and he had an easy style. But the trouble with The Beaux’ Stratagem as originally written, even for an educated audience, is that the play is too long, too difficult and too archaic. Could the RSC or England’s National Theatre put it on and get away with it? Probably. Could most of the rest of us? Probably not.
So Wilder was able to see the tremendous value of Farquhar’s play and wanted modern audiences to become acquainted with it. He wanted us to see it as an important step along the road of the Anglo-American comic tradition.
The second remarkable thing to me is that Wilder had the wisdom to choose this particular play. Wilder was such a wide-ranging, public intellectual that he is always refreshing. He knew German fluently and was smart enough to pluck a Nestroy play from the 19th century and turn it into The Matchmaker. And he knew his history of Restoration English comedy well enough to recognize that The Beaux’ Stratagem is more accessible than most other plays of its period. It’s full of sword-play and robbery, inn-keepers and damsels in distress. It has a dullard husband, a sexy barmaid, local yokels – and it’s the first play in the history of English drama to make divorce a solution to a bad marriage. It’s a classic play and a modern play all rolled into one.
Thus it was that I came to understand why Wilder started the adaptation; and after agreeing to finish what Thornton started (I get to call him Thornton because we collaborated), I came to understand what a clever man he was.
When my adaptation of Wilder’s adaptation of the Farquhar original premiered at The Shakespeare Theatre in Washington, DC, the reviewer for The Washington Post kindly wrote:
After its risky, radical reconstructive surgery, we can report that "The Beaux' Stratagem" is resting comfortably. No, more than comfortably -- charmingly. … Reading the play in its original form, you understand why a reworking would be in order. Packed with archaic references and numbingly discursive songs and soliloquies, the play seems more than a tad fusty, its characters digressing in oddly unenlightening ways. The new "Stratagem" … feels as if its originator is merely a cog in a writing team across the centuries (perhaps its rightful author should be called Farwildwig).
“Farwildwig.” What wonderful company.