BIOGRAPHY: NICHOLAS GRENEreviews Dion BoucicaultBy Richard Fawkes Quartet Books, 274pp. £15
TWICE IN HIS LONG theatrical career Dion Boucicault announced his retirement from the stage only to return for a comeback each time. Since his death, in 1890, and a prolonged period of derision and neglect, he has made a number of posthumous comebacks. In Ireland it was in the 1960s with the publication of The Dolmen Boucicault(1964) and a stylish Abbey production of The Shaughraun(1967) with an arch Cyril Cusack in the lead. In Britain it was the hugely successful 1972 Royal Shakespeare Company staging of Boucicault's first full-length play, London Assurance, which revived his reputation. When he saw London Assurance, Richard Fawkes knew nothing of the playwright, not even how to pronounce his name. But a meeting with Boucicault's great-grandson Christopher Calthrop eventually resulted in his very readable 1979 biography, reissued here. What is more, another comeback, the 2010 smash-hit revival of the play, directed by Nicholas Hytner at the Royal National Theatre in London, prompted the reissue with a magnificent image of Simon Russell Beale playing Sir Harcourt Courtly on the cover.
What made Boucicault the superstar of the 19th-century theatre, and what has enabled his best plays to prove revivable through into our own time? Born in Dublin in 1820, probably the illegitimate son of the controversial engineer Dionysius Lardner rather than his mother’s wine merchant husband, Samuel Boursiquot, most of his scrappy early education was in England. Yet he retained a strong Irish accent all his life and was mercilessly mocked when he tried to correct the English way of pronouncing words such as “war”: “Ye prenounce the ward as if it wuz spelt w-a-u-g-h”.
After he had struggled as a provincial actor under the name of Lee Moreton, London Assurance, an imitation Restoration comedy scrambled together when he was just 20, gave him a dream debut, a smash hit staged at Covent Garden with the best available cast of the day. It was a precocity like that of those other theatrical "Micks on the make" (to use Roy Foster's phrase) Congreve, Farquhar and Sheridan, before him, but unlike them he went on to make a career exclusively in the theatre.
And what a career it was. The alleged author of 250 plays or adaptations – Fawkes lists 152 titles – he was notorious for the speed with which he could turn a French melodrama into a usable English language show. He made and lost fortunes as a playwright, an actor and a hugely ambitious manager, bouncing back from two bankruptcies. He was a relentless self-publicist both in Britain and the United States, where he was based for almost half his career, soaking up ferocious press vituperation and turning it to account.
His plays were particular favourites with Queen Victoria, who saw The Colleen Bawnthree times before the death of Prince Albert put a stop to her theatregoing. His rackety private life was played out in public, including a bigamous marriage to the 21-year-old Louise Thorndyke when on tour in Australia at the age of 65.
Apart from his writing and acting skills, Boucicault was a theatrical innovator. His "sensation scenes" were forerunners of the special effects of modern cinema. In The Poor of New York(recycled on tour as The Poor of Liverpool,Leeds, Manchester, etcetera), he contrived to make an apartment building plausibly burn down on stage. But equally, and very necessarily with such spectacles in highly flammable Victorian theatres, he invented fireproof scenery. Modern playwrights owe him a good deal for agitating successfully for the payment of authorial royalties; before that dramatists starved on a flat fee while actors and managers got rich. Himself widely regarded as a plagiarist, he was a zealous litigator in protection of his copyrights.
The best of his parts, in which he starred so brilliantly himself, remain plums for the right actors: Myles-na-Coppaleen, Shawn the Post, Conn the Shaughraun. And these Irish melodramas can still hold their own, given the right production, as stagings in the Abbey over the past 20 years have shown.
The plays have to be given the full treatment; a 1990 low-key Brechtian version of
The Shaughraun
was a disaster. On the other hand, the 2004 production of the same play went way over the top into the coarsest of comedy. The through-scored 1998 Abbey
Colleen Bawn
gave a taste of what the original staging would have been like, the supporting music being another of Boucicault’s proto-cinematic features. The most recent high-spirited
Arrah-na-Pogue
managed to combine tongue-in-cheek irony with charm.
The 2011 edition is a straight reprint of the original 1979 text, so Richard Fawkes has not had the opportunity to make use of more recent scholarship by Luke Gibbons, Elizabeth Cullingford, Chris Morash or Deirdre McFeely, whose major book on Boucicault is due out soon from Cambridge University Press. It is on the whole well researched, though there are occasional mistakes that will be noticeable to an Irish reader: 1798 was not a "Fenian rebellion". But then Boucicault himself was not too fussy about such historical or topographical details: when adapting Gerald Griffin's Limerick-based novel The Collegians, he changed the setting of The Colleen Bawnto Killarney, while keeping the subtitle The Brides of Garryowen.What does a little geography matter when it makes possible a spectacular dive into a famously beautiful lake? This is an enjoyable book about a still-fascinating theatrical phenomenon.
Nicholas Grene is professor of English literature at Trinity College Dublin. His childhood memoir, Nothing Quite Like It,is published by Somerville Press
