The Rose Playhouse, Bankside – A Chaste Maid in Cheapside. 10th March 2015

Even in early spring, plays performed in the Rose Playhouse, Bankside’s archeological Tudor theatre, must be frugal with time, for modern conveniences such as heating and water closets are not provided. (You can warm up with a brisk walk to the facilities at the Globe if necessary.) In this case the fast-moving plot, well-paced delivery, short duration of the performance, and blue blankets provided by the Rose are sufficient to mitigate any minor bodily discomfort occasioned by the mid-March chill. Music is the first thing to warm the senses: 1950s pop songs play spectators into their seats, punctuate key scenes and often enhance humorous moments. From an ecotheatrical perspective, this production comes across as a lean, mean, thus suitably Lenten theatrical event.

Lenten or not, this comedy is not about frugality, but excess. The acting company (directed by Jenny Eastop) is absolutely on the nail in enthusiastically over-egging the wide range of emotions in performance here – horror, surprise, sorrow, anger, love, greed, frustration, mirth, angst, arrogance, avarice, lust and glee, to name just a few. Moll, for instance, is interpreted by Beth Eyre as a classic sulky teenager, big adolescent gestures communicating silent groans at the cringingly embarrassing antics of her appropriately named (maudlin) mother (Josephine Liptrott). When I saw it, little chuckles from the audience suggested others also appreciated Moll’s entrance in the Scene 1 squabble with her mother to the well-known lyrics of Dion and Belmont’s 1959 rock ‘n’ roll song: “Why must I be a teenager in love?” Later, when the ghastly Maudlin and gormless Yellowhammer (Stephen Good) run off to the riverbank in pursuit of their errant daughter, they all dash (precariously) round the edges of the Rose Playhouse pool, to the music of The Flight of the Bumble Bee (and the sound of a few loud laughs from the audience, some of whom may have been reminded, as I was, of Chaplinesque chaotic pursuits).

As everyone knows Lent is about abstinence, except that all anyone seems to think about in this play is indulging to the utmost in food and sex (and rock ‘n’ roll), ever in pursuit of wealth and power in both domains. Perhaps recalling some of the alleged excesses of the City pre credit-crunch, most of the protagonists are trying to cheat the system. The regular food double-entendres – goose, dish of birds, mutton, sharp-set stomach, selling flesh – draw out the interconnectedness of different forms of over-reaching. In the whirlwind of obfuscations our sympathies are with Touchwood Junior and Moll who naughtily conspire to have her goldsmith father make the wedding ring for their elopement. It is ordered right under his nose to fit his own daughter’s ring finger and inscribed with a rhyme about stupid parents, and even then, he doesn’t get it. But, this treatment is only fair: left to himself he would be content to see her married to the oleaginous Sir Walter Whorehound. This is a comedy so the guy gets the gal and the Whorehound gets his comeuppance – very nicely done by actor Andrew Seddon, who hilariously changes gears from arrogant insatiable lecher to abject penitent coward, when an injury reminds him of his mortality and the hellfire that surely awaits.

The question is, why does orchestrator Allwit (Timothy Harker), the willing cuckold who helps make Whorehound’s excesses possible and gleefully profits from them into the bargain, emerge unscathed from the casino? For a possible answer we need the ecological sub-text at work in the food fraud running through the play, brought to the fore in a key incident in Act II, Scene 2 (59-209) which is cut in this production. In the text,* the ‘Promoters’ (Lent compliance enforcers) are out-manoeuvred in a verbal skirmish with meat-cheat Allwit, turn a blind eye to corrupt meat-eaters who sufficiently grease their palms, and come down with the full weight of the law on the ‘poor’ country wench ‘fool’ enough to walk by with a joint of lamb on view in a basket. They soon realise they have been duped – her aim is to leave them holding the baby hidden beneath the lamb.

This disturbing practical joke seems to me to be where it is in the play text to reinforce the point that the rise or fall of almost everyone in this play, including Allwit (who sees himself as running the casino ‘box’ (bank)), rests on the transactional value of living things, children for land, babies for meat, fertility for money. This is nothing less than social bankruptcy in performance, and as this play amply demonstrates, its consequences are waste, profligacy and over-consumption at a time when the opposite should prevail. Such social conditions potentially spell ecological death – an important message in 2015.**

This unkind cut doesn’t change the fact that this is a really funny, theatrically effective production on the evidence of the spectatorial laughter and applause it evoked on the night I saw it, and the warm buzz of conversation as we all left afterwards. Nevertheless the danger of being frugal with Thomas Middleton’s tightly constructed play is that the crux of the matter may be lost: in the ethical void at work in Chaste Maid lie the seeds of spiritual, social and environmental destruction. This Lenten comedy is nothing less than a brilliant dearth play in disguise. It’s a good laugh – and it’s enough to frighten all who see it out of their wits.

Creatives
Stephen Good (Yellowhammer, a Goldsmith); Josephine Liptrott (Maudlin, Yellowhammer’s wife); Beth Eyre (Moll, their daughter); Andrew Seddon (Sir Walter Whorehound);Harry Russell (Touchwood Junior); Richard Reed (Touchwood Senior, his brother, also a Porter); Timothy Harker (Allwit, a neighbour and cuckold); Fergus Leathem (Sir Oliver Kix, also a Parson); Alana Ross (Lady Kix, his wife, also Allwit’s servant). Director: Jenny Eastop; Stage Manager/Operator: Ricky McFadden; Press and Publicity: Kate Johnston; Costumes: Sarah Andrews; Graphics and Design: Felix Trench.

Sources
Thomas Middleton (1999). ‘A Chaste Maid in Cheapside’, in Plays on Women, edited by Kathleen E. McKluskie and David Bevington (Manchester: Manchester University Press).*

Thomas Middleton (2012). ‘A Chaste Maid in Cheapside’, edited by Alan Brissenden, in Four Plays (London: Bloomsbury).

Edward F. Ricketts, Jack Calvin and Joel H. Hedgpeth (1985). Between Pacific Tides, revised by David W. Phillips (Stanford: Stanford University Press). **See p. 456.
Living things that are depleted by long-run environmental stressors (such as persistent insufficiency of water and nutrition), still alive but unable to function as part of the ecosystem they belong to, are referred to by Ricketts as ecologically “dead”.

Theatre Programme: Mercurius Presents A Chaste Maid in Ch£ap$ide, by Thomas Middleton, directed by Jenny Eastop (The Rose Playhouse).

Julie Hudson : 20 Mar 2015 16:25 |  Tags: Abstinence Archeology Cheating Dearth Ecological Death Excess Food-Security Lent Music Obfuscation Over-Consumption Over-Reaching Rose Playhouse |  Comments (0) |  Report a problem