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The Recruiting Officer (1998)

Written in 1706 by Irish writer George Farquhar, ‘The Recruiting Officer’ is a comedy set in and around the town of Shrewsbury in Shropshire. As the War of the Spanish Succession rumbles on in Europe, two recruiting officers, the womanising Captain Plume and the effete and cowardly Captain Brazen, attempt to entice the men of the town into the army and the women into their beds. Plume has an advantage here, for on his side is the redoubtable Sergeant Kite, who will use any means, fair or foul, to get men to join up.

Life is complicated by the women in their lives, who are far more independently minded, and smarter, than they can honestly cope with. Plume is promised to Sylvia, the daughter of a local Justice, Balance, but he’s also the father to a bastard born of a local girl, who Sylvia knows about and is caring for. Melinda, Sylvia’s cousin, was the amour of Plume’s friend Worthy, but he refused to marry her and instead proposed that she become his mistress, because she was too poor. Now she’s inherited a fortune, he’s back, but Melinda’s going to have a little fun with Worthy, by playing up to Captain Brazen. And then there’s Lucy, Melinda’s maid, who by subterfuge intends to wed Brazen too.

Hidden motives, trickery, miscommunication and disguise, all go towards making this boisterous romantic comedy laugh out loud funny, and it’s been doing it for over 300 years. It was the first play ever performed in New York City, at the Theatre on Nassau Street, on 11 December, 1732 (by amateurs too!). However, Farquhar didn’t benefit from its success. Heavily in debt and made ill with worry, he died in April 1707, not two months after the debut of his last play, ‘The Beaux Stratagem’.

Lark Rise

Welcome to the tiny hamlet of Lark Rise. It is the first day of the harvest, one summer early in the 1880’s…

Flora Thompson’s autobiographical trilogy ‘Lark Rise’, ‘Over To Candleford’ and ‘Candleford Green’, describing her childhood in a remote Oxfordshire farming community has been termed English Literature’s classic masterpiece of a lost way of village life – a vivid and moving account, rich in fascinating detail.

In 1978, Keith Dewhurst’s acclaimed adaptation for The National Theatre took characters and episodes, songs and scenes directly from the books, to create two composite plays – ‘Lark Rise’ and ‘Candleford’. Each of the plays also featured a wealth of traditional music contributed by the influential British folk-rock group, The Albion Band. (John Tams and Ashley Hutchings, both members of the band, acted as musical directors for the play.)

The result is an enchanting play which, while lacking a strong narrative, does offer an evocative and entertaining glimpse into how our ancestors lived and worked in the years before The Great War, and the machine age that finally succeeded in sweeping England’s rural innocence away forever. In place of The Albion Band we have The Royal Borough Band, led by Dave Hankey, with a few of our own members helping to provide vocals.

We hope you will accept our production of ‘Lark Rise’ as a pleasant diversion fit for a summer’s evening – especially in the garden of what is still, very much, a village pub.

The Recruiting Officer (1992)

It’s been said that ‘The Recruiting Officer’ reflects the warm afterglow of Blenheim’, and certainly, for a play written in a time of war, it is a confident and optimistic work. The War of the Spanish Succession had begun in May 1702, the latest in a series of European wars triggered by the ambitions of Louis XIV, ‘The Sun King’, ruler of France. Queen Anne had succeeded to the throne of England, Scotland and Ireland just two months previously, and she immediately appointed the John Churchill, the Earl of Marlborough, as the Captain-General of her armies. As war began, Marlborough was made supreme commander of the combined Anglo-Dutch army, and the campaign began well for him. So well that in December 1702, Queen Anne made him a Duke. The apex of his success however, lay at Blenheim, in Bavaria, on 13 August 1704, where a masterclass of planning and logistics paired with tactical and operational brilliance saw his forces defeat the Franco-Bavarian army so heavily that Bavaria was no longer capable of continuing the war. Patriotic fervour reached a crescendo, with even his enemies at court acknowledging the scale of his triumph. The Queen gave him the royal manor of Woodstock, on which Blenheim Palace would be built. And it is into this atmosphere that the play invites its audience.

George Farquhar, in 1704, was a soldier, having taken a commission as a Lieutenant of Grenadiers in the Earl of Orrery’s Infantry Regiment as a means of earning money. His recent plays had been unsuccessful, and he’d married a woman the previous year who already had three children from a prior marriage. He was practically penniless. That summer, his duties took him to Shrewsbury for a recruitment drive, and it was his experiences there that led to his writing of ‘The Recruiting Officer’. Supposedly he even wrote it in Shrewsbury, while staying in his lodgings at The Raven Inn.

The play, when it opened on the 8 April 1706 was a huge and immediate success, but his share of the income from the play was barely enough to cover his outstanding debts. Worse, he had contracted tuberculosis, and had to resign his commission in the army. Weakened by illness, he wrote one last play, ‘The Beaux Stratagem’ in just six weeks during the autumn of that year, and it opened on Drury Lane in March 1707 to universal acclaim. Sadly, its success came too late, and in May 1707 he died, aged just 30 years old.

‘The Recruiting Officer’, played in the traverse along the length of the main hall at the Coulsdon Youth and Social Centre, turned out to be the last, to date, summer production to take place there. From the following summer of 1993, Theatre Workshop Coulsdon would take its shows out into the open air. ‘The Recruiting Officer’ too would see the open air, being revisited by the group only six years on, in 1998.