Stephen Jeffreys: Plays

Stephen Jeffreys

• Publisher: Nick Hern Books
• Year: 2018
• Print ISBN:
  9781848427839
• eBook ISBN:
  9781788500739
• Topic: Literature
• Subtopic: British Drama
• Index: Literature

A selection of the best work of Stephen Jeffreys, whose career stretches from an award-winning play at the National Student Drama Festival in 1977 through to an adaptation of The Alchemist for the RSC in 2016.

Included here are his first big success, Valued Friends, a comedy of manners about the property market which won both the Evening Standard and Critics' Circle Awards; a riotous farce set in the time of Elizabeth I, The Clink, in which a stand-up comedian becomes involved in the political skulduggery surrounding the ailing queen; an autobiographical drama set in 1966, A Going Concern, about a washed-up family business; and Jeffreys' smash-hit, The Libertine, a Restoration romp about the licentious Earl of Rochester, much revived and also filmed with Johnny Depp.

Rounding off the volume are two previously unpublished plays: Interruptions, inspired by Jeffreys' interest in the collective aspect of politics and his fascination with the Japanese aesthetic principle of Jo-ha-kyu; and a very likable, short autobiographical monologue, Finsbury Park.

Together, all six plays represent the impressively wide range of topics and styles that Jeffreys embraced. Above all, each one of them is intensely and enjoyably theatrical to its very core.

'I had the great pleasure of working with Stephen Jeffreys on his play, The Libertine. Would that all playwrights had his openness, his talent, his hard-headedness, his experience, his enthusiasm, his complexity, and perhaps best of all his talent and interest in eliciting the best in others' John Malkovich

'Stephen's plays always bear the kitemark of unique, handcrafted quality' Ian Rickson

THE LIBERTINE

For Sue Edwards

The Libertine, presented by Out of Joint, was first performed at the University of Warwick Arts Centre on 20 October 1994 and then on tour, culminating at the Royal Court Theatre, London, on 6 December 1994. The cast was at follows:

JANE	Cathryn Bradshaw
ELIZABETH MALET	Amanda Drew
TOM ALCOCK	Bernard Gallagher
CHARLES SACKVILLE/HARRY HARRIS	Barnaby Kay
ELIZABETH BARRY	Katrina Levon
KING CHARLES II	Tim Potter
BILLY DOWNS	Nicola Walker
GEORGE ETHEREGE	Jason Watkins
JOHN WILMOT, EARL OF ROCHESTER	David Westhead
MOLLY LUSCOMBE/MRS WILL UFTON	Tricia Thorns
All other parts played by members of the company.
Director	Max Stafford-Clark
Designer	Peter Hartwell
Lighting Designer	Kevin Sleep
Music	Mickey Gallagher

The Libertine was revived by TRH Productions and Theatre Royal Bath Productions on 31 August 2016 at the Theatre Royal Bath before transferring to the Theatre Royal Haymarket, London, with the following cast:

ELIZABETH MALET	Alice Bailey Johnson
TOM ALCOCK	Will Barton
HARRY HARRIS/JACOB HUYSMANS/	Cornelius Booth
CONSTABLE
KING CHARLES II	Jasper Britton
JOHN WILMOT, EARL OF ROCHESTER	Dominic Cooper
GEORGE ETHEREGE	Mark Hadfield
ELIZABETH BARRY	Ophelia Lovibond
BILLY DOWNS	Will Merrick
MRS WILL UFTON/MOLLY LUSCOMBE/BIG DOLLY/MADAM	Lizzie Roper
CHARLES SACKVILLE	Richard Teverson
JANE	Nina Toussaint-White
ENSEMBLE	Emily Byrt Jonathan Hansler Joseph Macnab James Marchant Lydia Piechowiak
Director Set and Costume Designer Lighting Designer Sound Designer Composer Casting Director	Terry Johnson Tim Shortall Ben Ormerod John Leonard Colin Towns Ilene Starger

Introduction to the 2016 Edition

It’s now twenty-two years since the premiere of The Libertine at Warwick Arts Centre in Max Stafford-Clark’s production. In that time the play has enjoyed numerous reincarnations; an American premiere by Chicago’s Steppenwolf with John Malkovich in the lead in a production by Terry Johnson; a radio version directed by the much-missed Claire Grove with Bill Nighy; a film directed by Laurence Dunmore starring Johnny Depp; a reading to celebrate the fiftieth anniversary of the English Stage Company at the Royal Court Theatre starring Kevin McNally; and numerous drama-school productions of which the ones at Mountview Theatre School have been the most notable. Most recently there was a splendid revival by Dominic Hill at the Glasgow Citizens Theatre with Martin Hutson in the lead, and now another Terry Johnson production with Dominic Cooper which is in rehearsal as I write.

The Second Earl of Rochester has flitted in and out of my life all this time and my fictionalisation of him has undergone various alterations with each successive version. The Glasgow production and the Bath/London one have provided me with an opportunity to arrive at a new edition of the play which I hope will be definitive.

Two factors were influential in making the journey so tortuous. The first was purely personal: while I was writing the second half of the play in 1994, my mother died and the consequent loss of focus in my life was reflected in my organisation of the material for the original production.

The second factor was a result of the abundance of incident in my subject’s life. Though Rochester was dead at thirty-three, he was involved in many more incidents than can be fitted into a single play. But even though I didn’t dramatise his abduction of a wealthy heiress, his involvement in two battles at sea and his career as a reluctant duellist, I couldn’t resist including in the first production the episode where, as a means of escaping the King’s attentions, he posed successfully for several weeks as a quack doctor in the East End. It was after an early preview of the Steppenwolf production that John Malkovich pointed out to me that I was asking him to play a man in terminal physical decline who simultaneously turns in an astoundingly energetic comic performance as the cod Italian Doctor Bendo. He asked for a new scene immediately and played it the very next evening. Without Doctor Bendo, the whole second half then fell into shape and it’s this version, with a few interpolations from the film and a number of cuts which reflect my evolving taste in dialogue style, that you can read here.

I would like to reiterate my thanks to Max Stafford-Clark, probably the greatest director of new plays the British theatre has ever seen, for commissioning The Libertine in the first place; and to the late Jeremy Lamb, one of Rochester’s biographers, who communicated to me his passion for John Wilmot and all his work. Jeremy’s life and death were appropriately Rochesterian. And I’m indebted to Terry Johnson whose enthusiasm for the play (at least as at the time of writing) seems undimmed.

Rochester was a man who was endowed with every conceivable talent and chose, deliberately and methodically, to waste each one. It is a response to life which still strikes a chord today.

Stephen Jeffreys

Author’s Note

For dramatic reasons I have slightly compressed and rearranged events in Rochester’s life without, I hope, distorting the historical record. In the original production the parts of Sackville and Harris were doubled: I would prefer these parts to be played by two different actors, but if this is not possible, lines ascribed to Sackville in scenes where Harris appears should be taken by Etherege or Downs.

S.J.

Characters

JOHN WILMOT, Second Earl of Rochester

GEORGE ETHEREGE, a playwright

CHARLES SACKVILLE, Earl of Dorset and Middlesex

HARRY HARRIS, an actor

BILLY DOWNS, a young spark

JANE, a prostitute

MOLLY LUSCOMBE, a stage manager

MRS WILL UFTON, a coffee-house proprietor

TOM ALCOCK, a servingman

ELIZABETH BARRY, an actress

ELIZABETH MALET, a country wife

CHARLES II, a monarch

JACOB HUYSMANS, a portrait painter

And PLAYGOERS, WHORES, CLIENTS, GUARDS, WATCH

The action moves continuously from scene to scene without any breaks except for the interval.

Prologue

Lights up. ROCHESTER comes forward.

ROCHESTER. Allow me to be frank at the commencement: you will not like me. No, I say you will not. The gentlemen will be envious and the ladies will be repelled. You will not like me now and you will like me a good deal less as we go on. O...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title Page
• Contents
• Foreword by Ian Rickson
• Introduction by Annabel Arden
• Valued Friends
• The Clink
• A Going Concern
• The Libertine
• Interruptions
• Finsbury Park
• About the Author
• Copyright and Performing Rights Information