Shakespeare meets Jane Austen in Regency staging of Two Noble Kinsmen

In a tale of the perils of love and lust, Duke Theseus interrupts his wedding day to defeat the tyrant Creon, capturing his nephews and dragging them back to Athens in chains. "Jail-breaks, unrequited love and Morris dancing swiftly ensue," says director Tom Straszewski.

"The plot is taken from Chaucer's Canterbury Tales, with Shakespeare revisiting A Midsummer’s Night Dream and the wedding of Theseus and Hippolita, but this is Shakespeare older and wiser, teamed up with a rising writing star in the form of John Fletcher.

"This time the Fairy King is busy with other issues in 'Midsummer', and it's clearly set in May time rather than midsummer."

Jennie Wogan, as Emilia, in the De Grey Rooms Ballroom. Picture: Andrew Isherwood

Straszewski has taken time away from directing this year's waggon staging of the York Mystery Plays and his company Bronzehead Theatre to direct a cast of 16, with such delights as Morris dancing arranged by  the Ravens Morris from Shiptonthorpe.

"It’s a delightfully passionate play. Anybody who's been in love will recognise themselves in one of the characters, although that's not always flattering," he says.

"It's the flipside to A Midsummer's Night Dream: a royal wedding; the lovers argue; Theseus struggles to keep control; there are rude rustics rehearsing in the forest. But love is more realistic this time round. There’s no fairy king waiting in the wings to make a happy ending. They have to make it happen themselves or go mad trying."

Straszewski had first encountered Two Noble Kinsmen in his University of York student days. "I actually performed in an amateur production at King's Manor with the Lords Of Misrule, and I thought it was a most wonderful and strange play," he recalls.

"Their take on it was that it's about chivalry, based on Chaucer's The Knight's Tale, so you have mediaeval knights mixed in with heroes and goddesses, which is certainly one way to do it, but I've gone another way as I find that mediaeval plays come across as too sword and sandals sometimes."

Jim Paterson's Arcite in Two Noble Kinsmen. Picture: John Saunders

For the setting, Straszewski has looked instead to the prisons of Georgian England. "French prisoners-of-war put on plays to pass the time and they were wildly popular," he says. "That’s our link to Two Noble Kinsmen: both the Theban cousins and the Amazonian sisters are prisoners of war. They have to find their own ways out of captivity.

"It's very rarely brought up in productions of this play that they're prisoners but it's very much a hostage situation at the start, so we're playing that up."

Straszewski is placing his 'Kinsmen' in Regency England, right at the end of the Napoleonic wars. "We have the suitors and lovers from Jane Austen, and her critique of the dependence of women on marriage to survive," he says.

"We have the perfect neo-classical setting in our venue of the De Grey Ballroom. We’ve even got a wicked Wickham and a brooding Mr Darcy in the form of Ruben Wollny’s Palamon and Jim Paterson’s Arcite – although they’d argue over which one is which."

Meredith Stewart plays the Gaoler’s Daughter, who falls in love with one of the prisoners. “She’s a wonderful, versatile role,” says Meredith. “She’s wilful, smitten and somewhat childish. She embarks on quite a journey, losing and regaining control of her life in the woods.

Jess Murray as The Wooer and Meredith Stewart as the Gaoler's Daughter. Picture: John Saunders

"By the end, she's radically different to who she was when she started out; she goes through a crazy ordeal, all for a guy who definitely doesn't appreciate her. You really root for her. As the play unfolds, she proves herself a force to be reckoned with, and I think seeing her journey onstage will be thrilling.”

The company has found inspiration in York’s own Georgian history, with Nick Jones’s Doctor, for example, being indebted to William Tuke, who founded the local Retreat. 

For her character of The Wooer, Jess Murray has used Regency heiress Anne Lister as a model, Lister having infamously married her wife, Ann Walker, in nearby Holy Trinity Church on Goodramgate.

"Anne Lister was seen as one of the first lesbian figures of England, and her wedding was a wonderfully local story, so we thought that, with not a lot of men auditioning, we'd cast Jess Murray as The Wooer," says Straszewski.

"Usually the role isn't played by a woman, but I did some research on what was going on in Regency England and though we've taken Jane Austen as a main influence, we didn't want it to be Pride & Prejudice Redux."

Jennie Wogan's Emilia, Jim Paterson's Arcite and Ruben Wollny's Palamon in Two Noble Kinsmen. Picture: John Saunders

In essence, "in this play everyone is living up to a role or pretending to be someone completely diiferent," says Straszewski.

Assessing the differing characteristics of Fletcher and Shakespeare's writing, he posits: "I think that Fletcher is frankly better at the dialogue for the punchy scenes of arguments. He's more demotic, less willing to rely on wordplay - and it's the arguments where the play comes alive.

"Fletcher hands over the beginning and the end to Shakespeare to do the flowery bits, whereas he does the rustics and the middle classes. But to be honest, they both lift each other up." 

This week's performances will be running in conjunction with the Feminist Fletcher Festival in York. Actors and academics will hold a Q&A session at 4.30pm after Saturday's 2pm matinee, with free entry with a ticket from any performance of Two Noble Kinsmen. Evening performances start at 7pm; tickets are on sale on 01904 623568, at yorktheatreroyal.co.uk or on the door.

In the cast are:

Arcite: Jim Paterson
Doctor: Nick Jones
Emilia: Jennie Wogan
Gaoler: Ruth Chapman
Gaoler's Daughter: Meredith Stewart
Hippolita: Val Punt
Palamon: Ruben Wollny
Pirithous: Owen Williams
First Queen: Cynthia Wood
Second Queen/ Second Rustic:- Nance Turner
Third Queen/Emilia's Maid: Joy Warner
First Rustic: Janice Newton
Third Rustic: Lilou Poschen
Fourth Rustic: Anavey Heaven
Schoolmistress: Diana Wyatt
Theseus: Thomas Jennings
Wooer/Fifth Rustic: Jess Murray

Crew:
Director: Tom Straszewski
Assistant director: Lena Tondello
Costumes: Whitney Ivey
Fights: Neil Tattersall
Dances: Alan and Diane Heaven and the Ravens Morris
Make-up and hair: Robert Worrall
Instrumental music: Jonathan Brockbank

Sung music director: Eilidh Pollard