Stage-to-screen review: London Assurance

When NTatHome first launched I tried it out with the oldest recording they'd put on the platform; I think Phèdre still holds that title but another of the early NTLive screenings has recently joined it, giving me a chance to rewatch a show I remembered fondly, and see how well it held up. A far cry from Peloponnesian angst and bloody horse-related deaths (although they do have a bit of forbidden lust in common,) in 2010's London Assurance Nicholas Hytner revived the early hit for largely forgotten 19th century theatrical juggernaut Dion Boucicault. Boucicault's work generally hasn't stood the test of time, and tends to work best when radically reconceived or flat out parodied, and this too has needed some tinkering: In an ongoing collaboration that would have its most famous example the following year, Hytner got Richard Bean to do a thorough rewrite of the script.

The big selling point was the pairing of Simon Russell Beale and Fiona Shaw as two of the play's major grotesques: Ageing London fop Sir Harcourt Courtly (SRB) visits the countryside to meet the woman thirty years his junior whom he's been engaged to since her birth, in a complex contract involving their families' land.

Resigned to her fate, Grace (Michelle Terry) has never really thought much about romance, until she's visited by Sir Harcourt's son Charles (Paul Ready,) who's arrived in disguise. The two fall for each other and have to contend with the fact that she's meant to marry his father - but they conceive of a way of making him give up his claim when the older man is smitten with Grace's married cousin, Lady Gay Spanker (Shaw.) They recruit Lady Gay into their plan to make Sir Harcourt think he has a chance with her, but with most of the characters unaware of the deception, misunderstandings and chaos abound.

Boucicault pokes fun both at the effete, courtly Londoners, and the huntin', shootin', fishin' country folk who are more comfortable around horses than people (Mark Addy's Squire Harkaway sings his niece Grace's praises, but with the caveat that she's only got two legs,) so we also get the inclusion of con-man Dazzle (Matt Cross,) ligging off them all, while attorney Meddle (Tony Jayawardena) is constantly plotting nuisance lawsuits to get his hands on the gentry's money. With the supporting cast full of faces that would become familiar and beloved on stage over the next decade, the production was also notable for the final performance of the late Richard Briers as Lady Gay's husband Adolphus, lapping up the scene-stealing cameo as the literally doddering old man, whose frisky side his wife suppresses with his nightly tonic.

London Assurance remains a lot of fun - much as theatre can do good work dealing with political and social issues, this kind of pure escapism is so important in dark times as well, and you can trace a line from this to Bean's more recent Jack Absolute Flies Again on the same stage. The star names turn out just the kind of outrageous performances they were hired for, SRB leaning into the ludicrously overpainted fop, and Shaw providing the sort of overenthusiastic horsey woman she used to play all the time, and who Lady Gay may be the last of. They're helped a lot by Mark Thompson's costumes, which on video you get to appreciate the full ridiculous extravagance of. And in the younger couple of course we also have not only two very strong comic performers (Terry's no-nonsense delivery is perfect for Grace's eye-rolling ability to see through the men's attempts at subterfuge) but what turned out to be another long-standing real-life couple.

From seeing this live twelve years ago I remembered how Bean and Hytner dealt with Boucicault's dodgy references to the moneylender Solomon Isaacs (Junix Inocian,) and even this short a time afterwards I'm not sure they would have gone for the same approach, but certainly going in a downright surreal direction is an effective way of defusing some attitudes very much Of Their Time^TM, without sweeping them under the carpet entirely. And it fits in with a play so silly that Charles' response to being caught by his father is to swear blind that he's just his son's doppelganger - and to be believed. Until I looked through old reviews to find photos to illustrate this, I'd forgotten how universally beloved this production was at the time. That love still feels well-deserved, and London Assurance is something to cheer up a gloomy autumn twelve years down the line.

London Assurance by Dion Bouciault, adapted by Richard Bean, is available to stream via NTatHome.

Running time: 2 hours 15 minutes.

Photo credit: Catherine Ashmore.