Gilbert Foggerty's Fairy

1. Auflage 2022
ISBN: 978-1-80447-044-2
Verlag: Renard Press
Format: EPUB
Kopierschutz: 6 - ePub Watermark

E-Book, Englisch, 128 Seiten

'Take care. The consequences of an act are often much more numerous and important than people have any idea of.' Today W.S. Gilbert is best known for the comic operas he produced in collaboration with Arthur Sullivan, a creative partnership that diverged over the supernatural. Unlike Sullivan, Gilbert was a great fan of fairy tales, and Foggerty's Fairy, one of his most unjustly neglected plays, is a brilliant farcical comedy that hinges on the wish-granting of a fairy.  Loosely based on his short story 'The Story of a Twelfth Cake', Foggerty's Fairy considers the dangers of playing with the past. Trying to shore up his relationship, a man enlists a fairy's help to make a few tweaks in his past - he soon realises, however, these small changes have made great waves through time, and his present becomes unbearable.

William Schwenck Gilbert (1836-1911) was a dramatist, poet, author, illustrator and librettist. Although he was a prolific writer, producing around 75 plays and dramatic works, he is best known today for the comic operas he produced in collaboration with Arthur Sullivan, including HMS Pinafore, The Pirates of Penzance and The Mikado, which continue to enjoy huge popularity worldwide.

Autoren/Hrsg.

Gilbert, W. S.

Leseproben

introduction

foggerty: There’s one question I should like to ask – this is not a pantomime?

rebecca: Bless the man, no.

foggerty: It won’t end in my being changed into Harlequin, and Jenny into Columbine, or any nonsense of that sort, will it? Because if it does—

rebecca: You need not alarm yourself. This is not a Pantomime, but a very graceful and poetical Fairy Extravaganza. Rather dull, perhaps, but quite refined, and containing nothing whatever that could shock the sensibilities of the most fastidious.

(Foggerty’s Fairy, Act i)

Foggerty’s Fairy is one of W.S. Gilbert’s funniest and most inventive plays, but also one of his least well known. Its central idea, that to make even the smallest alteration to the past leads to major changes in the present, may seem child’s play to a modern audience brought up on the conventions of twentieth-century science fiction, but it was unfamiliar to many at the time. First performed at London’s Criterion Theatre on the 15th of December 1881, it bewildered critics and audiences alike. They generally agreed with the mixed assessment of Reynolds’ Paper: ‘It is a play full of original and witty conceit; but the plot is madness gone mad.’ The Referee declared: ‘Foggerty’s Fairy is a puzzle which wearies in the solution,’ while the Sportsman judged the plot to be ‘something too much like a proposition in the sixth book of Euclid to be followed by any average audience’. Despite its widely acknowledged wit and invention, it lasted for only twenty performances, closing on the 6th of January 1882.

However, the idea of the play originated much earlier. Gilbert had contributed an illustrated short story called ‘The Story of a Twelfth Cake’ to the Christmas number of the Graphic in 1874. It told the tale of confectioner Tommy Williamson, who is granted three wishes by a visiting fairy, enabling him to obliterate elements from his past – each wish flinging him into an ever-worse alternative present, until, with his final wish, he obliterates from his life the meeting with the fairy that had caused all the trouble in the first place.

Five years later, in 1879, having been commissioned by the actor Edward Askew Sothern to write a play, Gilbert recalled his old story and developed it into a wild farcical comedy. Sothern was best known in his time for creating the role of Lord Dundreary in Tom Taylor’s comedy Our American Cousin (1858). Lord Dundreary, whose scenes were largely improvised by Sothern himself, was a comic character of genius, a brainless but whimsical aristocrat with a logic all his own:

Birds of a feather flock together: yes, that’s it! As if a whole flock of birds would have only one feather! They’d all catch cold. Besides, there’s only one of those birds could have that feather, and that fella would fly all on one side! That’s one of those things no fella can find out. Besides, fancy any bird being such a d——d fool as to go into a corner and flock all by himself!

Lord Dundreary took the English-speaking world by storm. The extravagantly long side whiskers sported by Sothern’s character became known as Dundrearies, and his eccentric sayings were known as Dundrearyisms. But the role became something of a millstone to Sothern, and he was always on the lookout for a part that could replace its success.

Sothern felt a great kinship with Gilbert’s deadpan style of comedy, and regarded him as ‘one of the shining lights of modern dramatic literature’. In fact, Sothern had commissioned a previous play from Gilbert, a comedy drama called The Ne’er-Do-Weel, which, after some discussion in 1876–77, he regretfully returned to Gilbert as being unsuited to his taste.

Nevertheless, Sothern retained great admiration for the dramatist, and eagerly embraced Gilbert’s new play. The Era, the weekly paper of the theatrical profession, reported on the 29th of February 1880: ‘Mr Sothern says that, although his new comedy, by Mr Gilbert, has cost him 3,000 guineas, he would not take 6,000 guineas for it now. It is a piece of the wildest absurdity ever perpetrated, and all the parts are immense.’ The extravagant language is very typical of Sothern (his letters are full of block capitals and exclamation marks), but the enthusiasm was certainly genuine.

Tragically, however, Sothern’s health was deteriorating rapidly. He wrote in a letter to the New York Spirit of the Times in July 1880: ‘I have been, and still am, dangerously ill, and am under the charge of a celebrated physician in such nervous complaints, but so weak that I can scarcely crawl from room to room.’ He was forced to cancel his engagements; the production of Foggerty’s Fairy promised for October 1880 never happened. He died on the 21st of January 1881 at the age of 54.

After Sothern’s death, the play was taken up by another leading light of theatrical comedy, the Criterion Theatre’s actor-manager Charles Wyndham, who was well known for his production of farces, such as James Albery’s scandalous Pink Dominos (1877). Uniting Wyndham and Gilbert’s much-anticipated new farce must have seemed a sure recipe for success. Indeed, as The Era reported on 17 December, ‘The audience assembled at the Criterion Theatre [for the first night] on Thursday evening was as friendly as it could possibly be.’ However, as The Referee said, ‘Criterion audiences assemble not to solve abstruse problems or to follow out the intricacies of a dramatic maze.’ Frankly, the play’s complexity baffled them.

The action begins on Frederick Foggerty’s wedding day, when, just as he is on the verge of marrying Jenny Talbot, the proceedings are interrupted with the unexpected arrival on the scene of Delia Spiff, an old flame of Foggerty’s. In extremis, Foggerty summons his guardian spirit, the Fairy Rebecca, and invokes a magic spell to eliminate Miss Spiff from his life. However, as Rebecca explains, ‘if you obliterate an act and its consequences, it’s impossible to say what incidents may or may not have taken their place. You are pretty nearly sure to find yourself in an entirely altered state of circumstances.’ She also sets out an idea that is commonplace to us today, but which would have been much less so in 1881: the notion now called Butterfly Effect, which posits that the flapping of a butterfly’s wings can lead to a tornado – or, indeed, that a chance encounter between two dogs can lead to the birth of a Lancashire Foggerty.

The events of Acts Two and Three hinge upon the audience’s understanding of these notions, and on their ability to comprehend the difference between the world Foggerty thinks he is in and the world created by the elimination of Delia Spiff from his life. Anyone who has seen Back to the Future would have no trouble with Foggerty’s Fairy; but unfortunately, no one in 1881 had seen Back to the Future.

A good number of the critics seemed to find the plot too much to comprehend. The Stage exclaimed: ‘Never was an audience so completely at sea, and so thoroughly cast into wonderment and surprise as after the first act of Foggerty’s Fairy,’ while The Daily Telegraph grumbled: ‘The dramatic scheme is as elaborate as a difficult equation in algebra, and the senses seem to swim under the influence of all this illogical logic and this apparently senseless sense.’

The critics generally praised the play’s wit and inventiveness, but often with a weary sense that Gilbert had this time been rather too clever, as The Era opined:

It begins briskly, and all through there are comic ideas and quaint turns of expression such as no other dramatic author could have written. It is only fair to Mr Gilbert to say that, when these passages occurred, they were greeted with shouts of laughter. They were frequently so odd, so unexpected, as to take the audience by surprise. But the author’s power to take his audience by storm is nothing new. Usually, however, he accomplishes this by novel sketches of character, and by completely reversing the ordinary conditions of human life. But in this comedy he has gone far beyond any previous attempt, for the entire piece is a surprise. In previous works Mr Gilbert’s aim has been to set at nought everyday ideas, manners and customs; but in this wild piece of eccentricity he turns even stage traditions topsy-turvy…

The play had a mixed first-night reception. The Era noted ‘occasional murmurs’ from the audience, but also that Gilbert was called before the curtain at the end. As for the reviews, The Sportsman perhaps summarised the consensus best by calling the play ‘more fog than fairy’.

To judge from pre-production scripts held by the British Library, it would appear that extensive revisions were made to it after the first night, especially to Act Three, during which the first-night audience had grown restive. But even this was not enough to save the play, and it closed after three weeks.

Its...