In Spring '08 LOST presented:
Wild Oats by John O'Keeffe
“A collection of eccentrics caught up in a rapid stream of extravagant whim” – this is the description of the sparkling Regency comedy by all-but-forgotten Irish playwright John O’Keeffe, rediscovered by the Royal Shakespeare Company back in 1976 to much critical enthusiasm and wild public acclaim. Noted critic Bernard Levin declared it: “better than She Stoops To Conquer.....there is not to be found a more delectable entertainment pitched between Heaven and Charing Cross”, while an earlier pundit, William Hazlitt called O’Keeffe “the English Moliere”.
Yet, strangely enough, following upon this ecstatic rediscovery, the play returned to the library shelves, and there has been no other London production of it until now, when the LOST Theatre Company have seized the opportunity to return it to its rightful place upon the boards.
The play tells the story of how Rover, the star in a travelling troupe of actors, is persuaded to undertake the role of his friend Harry Thunder, in order to present himself as suitor to Harry’s cousin Amaranth, and how, by doing so, he sets in motion a whole series of mistaken identities and ingenious intrigues in which the comedy becomes hilarious.
Even so, for all its exuberance, Wild Oats reflects a genuine concern with the realities of life in the late eighteenth century, a time of much violence, poverty and injustice. O’Keeffe himself was all but blind, with a growing family he could support only by untiring industry, turning out more than seventy plays at the command of harassed theatre managers with an insatiable public. In his day it was not theatre convention but grim reality for the insolvent to be arbitrarily evicted from their homes, for young girls to be cozened into sham marriages, for young men to be press-ganged willy-nilly into rigorous naval service, and even for happy-go-lucky actors to be persecuted as rogues and vagabonds, while benevolent bodies like Quakers or Methodists would endeavour to bring peace and comfort into an often squalid, unsympathetic and perplexing world.
What John O’Keeffe proposes in Wild Oats is to introduce into this sometimes ugly society nothing short of the triumph of humanity and love.
Yet, strangely enough, following upon this ecstatic rediscovery, the play returned to the library shelves, and there has been no other London production of it until now, when the LOST Theatre Company have seized the opportunity to return it to its rightful place upon the boards.
The play tells the story of how Rover, the star in a travelling troupe of actors, is persuaded to undertake the role of his friend Harry Thunder, in order to present himself as suitor to Harry’s cousin Amaranth, and how, by doing so, he sets in motion a whole series of mistaken identities and ingenious intrigues in which the comedy becomes hilarious.
Even so, for all its exuberance, Wild Oats reflects a genuine concern with the realities of life in the late eighteenth century, a time of much violence, poverty and injustice. O’Keeffe himself was all but blind, with a growing family he could support only by untiring industry, turning out more than seventy plays at the command of harassed theatre managers with an insatiable public. In his day it was not theatre convention but grim reality for the insolvent to be arbitrarily evicted from their homes, for young girls to be cozened into sham marriages, for young men to be press-ganged willy-nilly into rigorous naval service, and even for happy-go-lucky actors to be persecuted as rogues and vagabonds, while benevolent bodies like Quakers or Methodists would endeavour to bring peace and comfort into an often squalid, unsympathetic and perplexing world.
What John O’Keeffe proposes in Wild Oats is to introduce into this sometimes ugly society nothing short of the triumph of humanity and love.
LOST Theatre Company
Patrons:
Sir Derek Jacobi
Ralph Fiennes
Roy Hickman MBE
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