Engaged (play)
The plot revolves around a rich young man, his search for a wife, and the attempts – from mercenary motives – by his uncle to encourage his marriage and by his best friend to prevent it.
The play opened at the Haymarket Theatre in London on 3 October 1877, the year before Gilbert's first great success with the composer Arthur Sullivan in their comic opera H.M.S.
The play has been called "unquestionably the finest and funniest English comedy between Bulwer-Lytton's Money [1840] and Wilde's The Importance of Being Earnest [1895] which it directly inspired", although some critics found it heartless.
It was a moderate success, but for Engaged he returned to his usual absurdist approach, inventing a cast of characters whose motivation is not love but money.
[18] In February 1879 the first American production opened at the Park Theatre, New York, with the comic actor James Lewis as Cheviot and Agnes Booth as Belinda.
[20] There were two London revivals in the 1880s: at the Royal Court Theatre opening on 30 November 1881, with H. J. Byron in the lead role, and at the Haymarket from 17 February 1886 starring Herbert Beerbohm Tree.
[21] The casts for the first production and the two 1880s revivals were: In the garden of a humble but picturesque cottage, near Gretna, on the border between Scotland and England, Angus Macalister is courting Maggie Macfarlane.
She briefly recounts the events at Gretna, and explains that under Scottish law a public declaration of marriage constitutes a legal union.
Maggie becomes hysterical and tells the truth to the Sympersons: Cheviot proposed to her three months ago and then immediately declared himself married to another woman.
Belvawney enters, assuring everyone that he was present when Cheviot and a certain lady declared themselves to be man and wife several months earlier on the border of England and Scotland.
Cheviot embraces Belinda; Belvawney turns to Minnie for comfort, Angus gives solace to Maggie, and Mrs Macfarlane reposes on the bosom of Symperson.
A reviewer in The New York Times noted that "the laughter was almost incessant", but wondered if what he saw as the author's heartlessness would prevent Gilbert's plays from lasting.
There were fifteen songs, mostly with words fitted to music by Sullivan, James Molloy, August Röckel and Ciro Pinsuti, with a few new pastiche settings by Porter Steele.
[36] The Times, reviewing the latter, commented, "One might have expected a patchwork, but the play, still extremely amusing, emerges surprisingly whole and unaffected except that by the addition of Sullivan's music its hard brilliance is transmuted as usual to gold".
[37] The adaptation had an amateur American premiere in New York in 1965, presented by the Village Light Opera Group, which produced it again in 1984, both times conducted by Ronald Noll.
[43] The Era judged it "one of those clever, fanciful, comical, satirical bits of extravagance in the way of stage work which might be expected from the pen of Mr Gilbert, but hardly from that of any other living author".
[44] Calling the play "smart, witty ... humorous ... brilliant" and Gilbert's "most Gilbertian" work, H. Savile Clarke wrote in The Theatre that "assuredly no writer has ever laid bare with a keener scalpel the sham and pretension that underlies the society of today.
"[45] The reviewer in The Athenaeum wrote, "The experiment has rarely, if ever before, been made of supplying a drama in three acts in which there is not a single human being who does not proclaim himself absolutely detestable", but the critic concluded that whether despite or because of this, Engaged was "one of the most mirthful and original that has, during late years, been seen on the stage".
[46] The New York Times reviewer wrote in 1879, "Mr Gilbert, in his best work, has always shown a tendency to present improbabilities from a probable point of view, and in one sense, therefore, he can lay claim to originality; fortunately this merit in his case is supported by a really poetic imagination.
In [Engaged] the author gives full swing to his humor, and the result, although exceedingly ephemeral, is a very amusing combination of characters – or caricatures – and mock-heroic incidents.
"[10] In a later assessment, T. Edgar Pemberton called the piece "whimsically conceived and wittily written" and judged it "a gem of the first water, with its every facet cut and polished to the point of resplendency".
[47] Reviewing the National Theatre's production in 1975, Irving Wardle thought Engaged "a play that falls short of the world masterpiece class, but that merits revival as a popular entertainment expressing its own period with unusual clarity".
[49] Reviewers of the 1983 London revival were divided: in The Guardian, Kenneth Hurren thought it apart from "a few quaint jocularities, merely a tedious old play".
[50] while in The Times, Anthony Masters thought it "mercilessly honest and extremely funny … with a cynicism that makes Ben Jonson and Wycherley seem full of the milk of human kindness".
Patrick O'Connor wrote of the 2003 Orange Tree production, "What is delightful in the complicated plot, with its insistence on the mercenary side of love and friendship, is that many of the lines have a contemporary ring to them and the situations seem to foreshadow the theatre of the absurd".
[43] Reviewing the 2004 Off-Broadway production, Marilyn Stasio wrote in Variety, "a sparkling period piece … the dialogue is a pure gift from a brilliant dramatist and thoroughly dyspeptic man".
[52] In a 2016 study of the makers of modern culture, Justin Wintle called Engaged "unquestionably the finest and funniest English comedy between Bulwer-Lytton's Money [1840] and Wilde's The Importance of Being Earnest [1895] which it directly inspired".
[1] As edgy as the smiling brutality of Joe Orton … To see Engaged on stage is to watch The Importance of Being Earnest discovering its long-lost father, and the works of Noël Coward their dashing, bewhiskered grandad.
In a 1971 study of Gilbert's works, Arthur Liebman remarks on the debt The Importance of Being Earnest owed to Engaged: "similarities in situations, characters, names, dialogue and stage effects which are indeed inescapable to the knowledgeable reader".
[58] Other critics have observed that the influence of Engaged extends beyond Shaw to Noël Coward and Joe Orton,[53][59] and to the Theatre of the Absurd.
