Theatre Review: A Gentleman’s Guide to Love and Murder, Walter Kerr Theatre, New York City

Last week the Secret Victorianist caught a show on Broadway – A Gentleman’s Guide to Love and Murder at the Walter Kerr Theatre. Although it’s set in 1907-9, I wanted to write about the play because of how much it owes dramaturgically to nineteenth-century melodrama.

The premise is simple – after his mother’s death, Monty Navarro finds there are only eight members of the D’Ysquith family between him and an earldom and so sets out on a murderous rampage, removing them one by one. Along the way he must also juggle his fiancée and mistress. The story is told retrospectively through a confession written in his prison cell prior to his execution for the one murder he did not commit.

The Secret Victorianist at A Gentleman's Guide to Love and Murder

The staging of the production demonstrates a self-conscious interplay with the conventions of the Victorian theatre. The scenes of Monty’s confession are played out on a stage within the stage – an ornately decorated proscenium arch, similar to those I saw in miniature at Pollock’s Toy Shop. Different locales, such as the frozen lake where one relative meets his demise, are suggested by 2D scenery, a nod to the painted backdrops which conveyed place in plays such as Wilkie Collins’s and Dickens’s The Frozen Deep (1856).

Portraits in Victorian and earlier dress come alive to deliver old-fashioned views on the purity of the bloodline and the prudence of rigidly enforced class distinctions, making Monty’s bloody ascent seem to stand for a new era of improved social mobility.

The set for A Gentleman's Guide to Love and Murder

What’s most Victorian about the play, however, is the co-conspiratorial relationship between the audience and the murderer (here more hero than villain). As in so many melodramas, the suspense doesn’t come from doubting what will occur, so much as waiting for actions we’ve already anticipated to happen. Instead, surprise comes from the innovative staging and comedic delivery – it’s like watching a magician at work.

Another layer of audience awareness is added by the use of one actor (on the night I went, Greg Jackson) to play the entire D’Ysquith family. The dramatic play is doubled as the audience enjoys each murderous plot devised by Monty (Jeff Kready), along with each new character assumed by Jackson.

The lack or ‘moral’ resolution may set the play apart from its historical models, but the opportunity to identify with a wrongdoer and revel in his societally disruptive behaviours (undermining marriage, class, inheritance) is distinctly familiar.

If you have the opportunity to watch the musical, I’d take it – it’s a riotously fun production, and an imaginative reworking of some staple dramatic traditions. Find out more here.

Do you know of any other theatre in New York you think the Secret Victorianist would enjoy? Let me know – here, on Facebook or by tweeting @SVictorianist.

A Victorian Alphabet: M is for Melodrama, Murder and Maria Marten

One of my first introductions to Victorian stage drama was a reworking of a late nineteenth-century melodrama which we attempted in a school drama class. The version of Maria Marten; or the Murder in the Red Barn we put on seemed somewhat dull work when compared with Andrew Sachs’s wittier and more knowing The Wages of Sin, which we also attempted.

The innocent virgin Maria is butchered in a secluded spot by the evil and conniving Corder, following on from her seduction, as the audience look on at his pantomime-like villainy. In The Wages of Sin meanwhile there were gentlemen stroking table legs, a female villain, and bullets ricocheting off chandeliers. There seemed to be no competition.

Maria Marten

 It was only years on when I learned more about Maria Marten that the play took on a new interest – not only the interest of knowing that a text is based on a real story, but the interest attendant on that story’s adaption for the stage and the corresponding elisions and deletions which involve turning people into characters.

Maria Marten, 25, was murdered by her erstwhile lover William Corder, 23, in 1827 on the night on which the pair had arranged to elope. Her remains were discovered the next year after her stepmother had a series of prophetic dreams, suggesting Maria’s fate, and Corder was captured, tried and executed. The crime spawned more than a century of adaptations and artistic responses, from an article by Charles Dickens in All The Year Round to five twentieth-century film versions.

A twentieth-century film version of the story

In many of these versions, such as the first one I encountered, Maria is transformed into a type – the virginal female victim. The real Maria had had at least three lovers and three pregnancies and for the modern tabloid press these details would make the story more salacious, but in the world of melodrama this untenable.

In melodrama, the villains and victims must be clearly indicated – the characters may be blind but an audience must not be. It’s the kind of acting which argues that people cannot act and that ultimately evil and murder will out. When I first encountered Maria Marten, I found the play clichéd and predictable – but now I think that it is much more interesting for being so.

What should be N in my Victorian Alphabet? Let me know here, on Facebook or by tweeting @SVictorianist.