The Recruiting Officer – Footnotes
The Footnotes to our episode on The Recruiting Officer include observations on the multiple meanings of its title and the extraordinary story of its first production in Australia in 1789.
The Recruiting Game
There is at the very least a twin meaning in the title of The Recruiting Officer. We first assume that it refers literally to Captain Plume, or perhaps also collectively to Kite and Brazen, as the officers who have arrived in town to recruit local men for the army. Of course the officers are also open to recruiting women for their pleasure, if not to marry. In fact as Plume confesses, he often achieves both goals by targeting the women to get through them to their male acquaintances, as he does with Rose in pursuit of Bulloch and Cartwright.
It is also true that the women in the play are out to recruit, in their case long-term romantic or economic partners. Silvia’s mission is to recruit Plume; Lucy seeks to enlist Brazen; Rose will be happy to snare either Plume or Jack Wilful. The parallels between the recruitment games of the sexes come together of course in the figure of Jack Wilful himself, or herself. Plume believes that he is recruiting another man for his army, while also inadvertently advancing his and Silvia’s matrimonial negotiations.
And the twin meanings of the recruitment game are further articulated in the use of military language to describe the campaigns of love: Melinda is likened to Helen of Troy, requiring a ten-year siege to win, and when Worthy laments that he was “forced to blockade” when his “general advance” on her was repulsed, Plume urges him to “redouble his advance”. The reciprocal metaphors are also used: Plume is “married” to the regiment, and finally of course Plume settles down to marry Sylvia and to “raise recruits” of his own – their children – who will perhaps become another generation of ‘recruiting officers’ as the cycle continues.
Nancy Carroll and Ffion Edwards in The Recruiting Officer
Donmar Theatre 2012.
Photograph: Johan Persson
The First Fleet’s production of the play
One of the extraordinary stories in the history of The Recruiting Officer is that of its being performed by a group of convicts in the newly-founded settlement in New South Wales in 1789. The ‘First Fleet’ carrying 1,400 people on eleven ships set sail in 1787 to establish the penal colony at Botany Bay under the command of Captain Arthur Philip. As the Governor in Chief of the new colony Philip was an unusually enlightened leader, for he saw that in the future the convicts would have to be constructively assimilated into the new settlement. Perhaps this vision inspired his initiative to stage their unlikely dramatic production. The performance was timed to honour King George III on his birthday on 4th June 1789.
The choice of The Recruiting Officer as the play for the convicts to perform seems appropriate to the circumstances of the colony. The Royal Marines sent with the convicts to establish the outpost colony were themselves recruited to this challenging mission, and the convicts were of course selected for their part in the venture in the same way that petty criminals were often impressed into the army.
The story of the convict production of the play was re-told in Thomas Keneally’s novel of 1987 The Playmaker. The Artistic Director of the Royal Court Theatre in London at the time, Max Stafford-Clark, was planning a new production of The Recruiting Officer when he came across Keneally’s novel. He was inspired to commission playwright Timberlake Wertenbaker to adapt the story into a new play that could run alongside their revival of The Recruiting Officer. Wertenbaker’s wonderful play Our Country’s Good premiered at the Royal Court in 1988, almost exactly 200 years after the extraordinary original performance.
063 – Dancing at Lughnasa, by Brian Friel
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Brian Friel’s magical memory play Dancing at Lughnasa is set at the time of the harvest festival in rural Ireland in 1936. It’s account of the events of that summer in the house of the five unmarried Mundy sisters is filtered many years later through the memory of Michael, the son of the youngest sister. His memory is undoubtedly unreliable, but it is also funny, poetic and profoundly poignant.
Josie Rourke, who directs the gorgeous new production of the play currently playing at the National Theatre in London, joins us to explore Friel’s spellbinding masterpiece.
062 – Private Lives, by Noël Coward
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Noël Coward’s play Private Lives is both a dazzling dramatic comedy and an excoriating portrait of love and marriage among the disaffected elite of the Jazz Age. Coward himself starred in the premiere production in both London and New York in 1930, the critics acclaiming the show’s construction and wit, but predicting that it would not last. As a new production opens at the Donmar theatre in London, I ask Coward’s newest biographer, Oliver Soden, why the play has aged so well.
061 – Sea Creatures, by Cordelia Lynn
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Cordelia Lynn’s play Sea Creatures is a poetic exploration of loss and grief, its setting betwixt the sea and shore rich in metaphoric resonances. As we record this episode, Sea Creatures is playing at the Hampstead Theatre in London in a spellbinding production directed by James Macdonald.
I am delighted to be joined by playwright Cordelia Lynn to talk about her fascinating new play.
The 2020 Theatre Diary – March
Before the theatres went dark this month I was lucky enough to see Caryl Churchill’s A Number at the Bridge, and spend more than seven hours in thrall to Robert Lepage’s Seven Streams of the River Ota at the National. Plus, some thoughts on what we miss when there is no theatre.
The 2020 Theatre Diary – February
Another great mix of shows this month, from Tom Stoppard’s new play, to Ibsen, Beckett and newer plays in smaller London venues.
The 2020 Theatre Diary – January
The January roundup included both classic plays, such as The Duchess of Malfi, Uncle Vanya and Three Sisters, as well as recent musicals Dear Evan Hansen and Girl from the North Country …
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