Love for Love

Abstract

Review of Love for Love by William Congreve. Directed by Selina Cadell, Royal Shakespeare Company, Stratford-on-Avon, September 2015-January 2016.A recent trend in staging plays, particularly "classic" plays, insists on authenticity and attempts to reproduce original staging conditions and atmosphere. The company Salon Collective, for instance, stages Shakespearean plays by providing the actors with only their speeches and cues- and has to scour the country to find actors who do not know the play in question (currently Two Gentlemen of Verona). Mark Rylance has memorably and brilliantly played Cleopatra at the Globe in the 1999 all-male production. More recently, in the Globe's 2012 all-male Twelfth Night, he played Olivia and was similarly memorable and brilliant. At the Globe and its new indoor space, the Sam Wanamaker Playhouse, "authentic" lighting, open air or candles, and acting techniques of direct-front or front-side stage address seek to reproduce the intimacy, conviviality, and interaction experienced between players and audiences in the plays' original settings.The Royal Shakespeares Swan Theatre has always offered such opportunities and has used a lot of the theatre space (including the galleries and aisles) for entrances. It is therefore understandable given the trend and the locale, that in the current Royal Shakespeare production of William Congreves Love for Love at the Swan, "authenticity" is the hallmark of this performance. In the lavish and well-illustrated RSC program, the director, Selina Cadell, herself an actress, explains that she "loves Restoration Comedy because it is actors' theatre." This play, first performed in 1694, is not actually a Restoration comedy but rather a play that remembers Restoration comedies of about twenty-five years previously such as The Country Wife. Yet Cadell's methods work very well. The driving concept behind this "actors' theatre" is that a troupe of travelling/strolling players are performing the play to mark the thirty-second birthday of Queen Anne. There is a sort of double conceit here, first that we are in a provincial theatre, or maybe a Hogarthian barn, watching the eighteenth-century actors move around clumsily falling into curtains and dropping tables. Secondly, however, we are who we are, taking our seats and watching Royal Shakespeare Company actors who are playing eighteenth-century actors, but who are also reverting to being "real" people asking for help from the audience-"Are my stockings straight?" "Can you help me tie my cravat?" "Can you give a hand moving the stuffed stag?"-as well as chatting informally-"What is the weather like? …