The Admirable CrichtonIn 2002 I directed JM
Barrie's The Admirable Crichton (a directorial debut) for the amateur
dramatic company ELTC (Exeter Little Theatre Company). It was staged at the
Barnfield Theatre, Exeter, as part of the annual Exeter Festival.
My
thanks to all - both cast and production team - who worked extremely hard on a
play that's difficult to stage due to its large cast and its major set and
costume changes.
The production received a good review from David
Marston, the Exeter Express & Echo critic: "... This production from
Exeter Little Theatre Company sets a high standard as it moves from a 1900s
drawing room to a distant tropical island - featuring some of the most brave
and unusual costumes seen on the Barnfield stage for some time ... The big cast
is led by Mark Norman as Crichton who has great physical presence ...
Jacqueline Cooper is splendid as Lady Mary. Also good are Adam Owen-Jones and
David Hill, who really embraced their parts. Director Clare Girvan has grabbed
this piece with gusto and her atmospheric music is particularly good."
Although it could be accused of being a period costume comedy
satirising virtually obsolete class roles, I think Crichton has plenty
of modern resonances: the relationship between a couple mismatched by class is
a staple of cinema (e.g. The African Queen) as is the idea of social
upheaval or isolation altering the pecking order of civilised society (e.g. the
savage boys in Lord of the Flies; or Mad Max III, where Tina
Turner plays 'Auntie', the leader of a rebuilt community, who was just a
waitress before the apocalypse). Crichton is not entirely a 'safe'
light comedy, and even has thematic resonances with a far darker play,
Strindberg's 1888 Miss Julie, "a quasi-Darwinian struggle across sex and
class lines" between a Count's daughter and the valet of their
household.
As to the interpretation, many recent productions have
interpreted Crichton not strictly 'by the book'. Some, for instance,
have introduced JM Barrie to narrate his own footnotes, even interacting with
the other characters. The set design for the island is rich in possibilities.
Crichton, as Barrie's title says, is a fantasy. The script tells us he
has built a sawmill and a blacksmith's forge, and installed a speaking tube,
electric lighting and a 'signalling device', etc. "We are not told," the editor
of the Sangam Books edition notes, "how all this was achieved in just two
years" with recourse only to salvaged materials. What else might Crichton
invent?
Bowdlerisation
It's also food for thought that the Crichton
we are familiar with is a bowdlerised version. One example is in Act 3.
Originally on cost grounds, we used the Indian-published Sangam Books edition,
and were surprised to find differences between this and the standard Samuel
French acting edition, which most amateur theatre companies use. The latter has
an exchange between Crichton and Lady Mary that runs:
Crichton:
"Dear Polly, I have grown to love you; will you let John Treherne make us man
and wife?"
... [Crichton takes her hand and kisses it with emotion - and
reverently. There is a pause. He crosses and sits in the chair and motions her
to sit on the ground in front of him. She does so.]
In the original
Barrie script, findable via Project Gutenberg or the Sangam Books edition, this
same scene runs:
Crichton: Dear Polly, I have grown to love you; are
you afraid to mate with me?
... [He takes her to him reverently. Presently
he is seated, and she is at his feet looking up adoringly at his
face]
Even in 1900, "to mate with me" was a double
entendre, and the editors at French clearly felt the need to expunge the
implication of a sex scene.
I decided to go with this implication -
decently screened by one of Crichton's devices literally drawing a curtain over
the scene - and with the spirit of Robinson's Eiland, the play that is
claimed to have inspired Barrie's Crichton. In this, the hero returns to his
island with the niece of his employer. In contrast, the ending of
Crichton is deeply downbeat: Crichton announces that he is leaving
service; "Tweeny" (who loves him) remains unhappy; and Lady Mary (who also
loves him) resumes her engagement to an aristocrat who has been unfaithful in
her absence. In the original version of the play, Crichton announced his plan
to marry Tweeny and establish a public house called "The Case is Altered" (the
working title of the play) but Barrie altered this after World War
1.
 While sticking to the rules of not
altering the text, I concluded the final scene to make it both upbeat and
resolve the emotional triangle, by Crichton being robed again in his lordly
cloak and both women leaving with him in an implied polygamous arragement.
Staging also subverted the text in other minor ways: for instance, in the
fourth act, to show the order hadn't been entirely restored, I had the Loam
daughters in more emancipated clothing and one of them drawing a suffragette
poster
StagingThe staging of The Admirable
Crichton can be fairly difficult. It needs a large cast, which we managed
to obtain by running it as a community play - i.e. one recruited openly, rather
than entirely within the company hosting it
Also, the four acts take
us to an English stately home; a deserted tropical island; the same island
developed through Crichton's industry; and back to the stately home.
See
the Costumes page for more on this aspect.
MusicI was very pleased to have found the music
of the Penguin Cafe Orchestra, best
known for their track Music For A Found
Harmonium. Their album Broadcasting from Home had a particularly
atmospheric set of pieces that perfectly conveyed the varying moods of the
play: for instance, the wistful
Isle of View (Music for
Helicopter Pilots), the busy
White Mischief, and
the stark Air, which I
used for the play's central emotional scenes. Music from a different group,
Sky's Carillon, backed
the final scene, its crescendo corresponding to the sudden reversal from sad
farewells into a triumphant exit. |
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About the play
Lord Loam, a turn-of-the-century English aristocrat, pays
lip-service to social equality. He promotes his views by tea-parties where
servants and aristocrats mingle (to the embarrassment of all, and the
disapproval of his butler, Crichton, who believes in the class system as a
natural hierarchy). On an ocean cruise, Loam and his retinue are shipwrecked on
a tropical island. There both men are proved wrong: the society that naturally
forms there isn't egalitarian, but nor is the class system
preserved.
 In fact Crichton rises to become a
resourceful but autocratic leader of the castaways. Lady Mary, Loam's daughter,
falls in love with him, forgetting her engagement to Lord Brocklehurst at home.
Just as she and Crichton are about to be married by Treherne, a clergyman
shipwrecked with them, a rescue ship arrives. They return to England, and the
Loam household reverts uneasily to its earlier hierarchy - until outsiders
begin to ask questions about what really happened on the island ... and indeed,
what did?
BackgroundJM Barrie (Sir James Matthew Barrie)
is, of course, best known as the author of Peter Pan. The title refers
to the nickname of James Crichton, a 16th century Scottish genius and athlete.
The epigram-loving Ernest is probably a caricature of the hero of Oscar Wilde's
The Importance of Being Earnest. The plot may well derive from
Robinson's Eiland, an 1896 German play by Ludwig Fulda. In this,
Arnold, a humble secretary, emerges as the natural leader of a shipwrecked
party of officials, and is pronounced Prince of Robinson's Island. (Carl
Markgraf's 1989 J.M. Barrie: An Annotated Secondary Bibliography
suggests Fulda, in turn, may have been influenced by Tom Taylor's desert island
play The Overland Route).
The Admirable Crichton was
first performed in 1902, and has since been made into two major films: before
the well-known 1957 one starring Kenneth More, in 1919 Cecil B DeMille filmed
it as Male and Female, featuring Gloria Swanson and a live lion (a
fantasy scene that perhaps over-literally interpreted Crichton's quotation from
William Ernest Henley's poem
To W.A. - "I was
a King in Babylon / And you were a Christian Slave"). Via the films and play,
Crichton has entered the language as the archetypal butler, even appearing in
the guise of Kryten, the robot butler in the science-fiction comedy Red
Dwarf.
Further reading
ContactIf you have any questions about the
production, feel free to contact me at the e- mail address below.
The
play requires Lady Mary to bring back a buck she has hunted; I have already
lent ours (a lovely stuffed-toy-style prop a textile crafting colleague made)
to a couple of productions.
Clare |
