Thomas Middleton’s A Mad World, My Masters opens at the Blackfriars Playhouse in Staunton, VA, on Friday, and judging by the preview performance I saw tonight, it’s a refreshing addition to their current season. Middleton’s plays have a freshness to them that makes them feel like distinctly modern pieces of writing. As Gary Taylor noted while discussing last year’s A Trick to Catch the Old One, Middleton presents his audiences with a fallen world where flawed people deserve and find happiness.
The ASC embraces Middleton’s scatological world in their production; they don’t check their punches in making us aware that we’re all cohabitants of a messy world. It’s hard to look down on Dick Follywit’s (Gregory Jon Phelps) stealing from his grandfather, Sir Bounteous Progress (Daniel Kennedy), who freely admits he will fritter away his wealth keeping a Courtesan (Miriam Donald), but you also enjoy seeing him get his comeuppance. What sets Middleton above his contemporaries is that all of these characters find some measure of happiness through their failings. This is Middleton’s ultimate gift to us: he lets us know that embracing all of those things about ourselves that we find distasteful is the key to our own happiness.
One of the confidence games Follywit plays on his grandfather is a play-within-a-play aptly called “The Slip,” which might well encapsulate Middleton’s theory of performance better than Hamlet’s advice to the player’s captures Shakespeare’s. The audience comes to the theatre to be conned, and we all have a good time being the victims of our own imaginations. Worrying about the time and money we lose in the theatre would only get in the way of our enjoyment of our time there, and in this way, at least, all the world is a stage in Middleton’s work. Shakespeare may elevate the spirit, but Middleton tells us to sit back and relax, we’re fine where we are.
It’s telling that Middleton gives us devils without angels. Tempted to turn back to committing adultery with Mistress Harebrain (Brandi Rhome), Penitent Brothel (John Harrell) is visited by a succubus in the Mistress Harebrain’s guise. Brothel may find the strength to turn away from sin through reading some holy book, but lacking a divine power to approve his virtue, the only rewards we can be certain he will find are terrestrial ones, but that’s ultimately enough. We’re all in this mad world together, after all.
Thomas Middleton shows us a London filled with sex, greed, and deceit in a way that reminds us that the more things change, the more they stay the same. If you’re in the mood for something refreshingly un-Shakespearean, stop by the ASC’s production of A Mad World, My Masters, which plays through April 7 at the Blackfriars Playhouse in Staunton, VA.
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