Pitlochry Festival Theatre, in repertory until 14 October 2004

JOHN DURNIN has launched his first season as Director of Pitlochry Festival Theatre with a real curiosity.  Even as an undergraduate studying 19th century drama, I’d never got round to reading W S Gilbert’s Engaged, and certainly never expected to see it produced.  The play’s absurd situations and ludicrous characters will be familiar to anyone who loves the later Savoy operas, but this early solo effort by Gilbert has a cynicism and satirical bite which Sullivan’s cheery music often masks in their subsequent collaborations.

Engaged is a comedy, and it does have its share of laughs, but it’s hardly surprising that the first performance in 1877 was greeted with a fair amount of hissing. Gilbert holds a dark and bitter mirror up to his middle class audience: every character in the play is utterly mercenary, and driven by the most basic emotions of greed and lust, while all the time professing the most high flown sentiments of honour and undying love.

Engaged (Pitlochry Festival Theatre 2004)

Cheviot Hills is a rich but stingy young man with the unfortunate habit of proposing to every attractive woman he meets.  His friend Belvawney benefits from an income of £1,000 a year, just so long as he prevents Cheviot from actually completing any of his marital vows.  When Cheviot ties the knot Belvawney loses the money.

Fate, of course, ensures that Cheviot Hills is faced with not one but three highly alluring young women in a short space of time, and ends up, under the terms of a ‘Scotch marriage’, accidentally married to one of them.  Or is he?  Was the declaration of marriage actually made on Scottish soil, or just across the Border?  On that crucial but obscure point hang the pecuniary and amatory fates of a whole network of thoroughly selfish and frankly unlikeable characters.

The device which sets the clockwork of the plot in motion is a train accident, just short of Gretna Green, engineered by a local swain who supplements his income from farming and poaching by wrecking trains so that his fiancée and her mother can fleece the unfortunate stranded passengers.  This leads to a great deal of dreadful cod Scots dialogue, something it feels rather uncomfortable to watch in a Scottish theatre with a Scottish audience.

As you would expect of Pitlochry, the play is beautifully designed—especially the sumptuous and imaginative costumes—and an energetic cast worked hard to bring this dusty relic to life and ensure a brilliant first night.  But I wondered if they got the tone right.  Gilbert himself advised that every line had to be spoken as if the actor had no sense of its absurdity, or the play would drag, and drag it did, especially as the final act repeated so many of the jokes and situations from the previous two. No doubt Victorian acting was over the top by our standards, but there were too many moments when the actors resorted to desperate mugging to wring more laughs out of a play that wasn’t really quite witty enough.

And there’s the point. Engaged is a fascinating piece of theatre history, because it explains that The Importance of Being Earnest had a real pedigree, and didn’t spring fully formed from the fertile mind of Oscar Wilde.  Indeed, Earnest, with its ludicrous behaviour masked by the façade of social decorum, and romantic love constantly undercut by financial concerns, is almost unthinkable without the example of Engaged.

But the earlier play has little of Wilde’s brilliant ability to encapsulate a whole social world in a single telling phrase (‘not even for ready money’; ‘the line is immaterial’; ‘we have missed the last train’).  Raising the spectre of Wilde is to reveal Engaged as a creaky, cumbersome piece of work.  For its 1877 audience it may have been as shocking as Joe Orton’s Loot was almost a century later, but today it is little more than an intriguing footnote to a great partnership of musical theatre.

© Robert Livingston, 2004