Prettifying a menace to society

THE historian Simon Schama has noted of Beaumarchais, whose best play The Marriage of Figaro is currently at the Abbey, that his life was "stained with the social ambiguities of 18th-century France. He had been magistrate and prisoner, courtier and rebel, diplomat and spy, businessman and bankrupt, publisher and publicist, insider and outsider." He was, in other words, a walking menace to a society that still liked to pretend that society was organised into fixed and immutable classes. Small wonder that his play, which opened five years before the storming of the Bastille, - came to be seen as a prologue to the French Revolution. Louis XVI, listening to Figaro's attack on hereditary wealth in Act 5, actually proclaimed that "the Bastille would have to be destroyed if the performance of the play is not to have dangerous consequences".

Small wonder either that The Marriage of Figaro became best known in operatic versions by Mozart and da Ponte, from which all of the politics and most of the subversive mischief has been purged. The big wonder, though, is that the process is still going on. For Michael West's version at the Abbey is emphatically closer to the spirit of the prettifiers of Beaumarchais than to the play's original intent. It is, in Brian Brady's production, slick, pretty, pleasant and quite astonishingly anodyne.

One reason for the blandness is the decision to shift the action to 1936, losing the sense of a play being enacted in a world that is about to be engulfed by the tide of revolution. It is not that there is anything wrong in principle with taking a play out of its original setting - provided that a new world is built up around it. The problem here is that the play ends up in no world at all.

In terms of theatrical style, it is cut off from its roots in the vigorous tradition of commedia dell'arte and ends up in a second-hand version of a Noel Coward comedy. The gutsy, ribald, streetwise energy that makes the play so remarkable is translated into a vague and effete atmosphere of elegant lassitude.

IN terms of content, it ends up with 18th-century attitudes underlying what is supposed to be a 20th-century story. More specifically, the shift in period brings just one gain and a lot of losses. The gain is that we now know that in 1936, a terrible war was brewing and the business of the Count's son, Cherubino, being sent off to join the army acquires an unexpected poignancy, especially when he is told "There isn't going to be any war. Nobody's going to die."

But this doesn't make up for a fundamental loss of logic. If the play is set in the 1930s, the audience is entitled to ask why Suzanne doesn't just tell the Count where to stick his unwanted attentions, or why there is a connection between Suzanne's marriage and the Count's interest in deflowering her. These questions don't arise in Beaumarchais's original: the Count is a feudal lord and feudal lords have a droit de seigneur. Yet, even though such a notion is completely anachronistic in 1936, everybody continues to behave as if they are still living in a feudal society.

Even leaving aside the question of period, though, this version of the play seems to deliberately obscure the central tension of the story - the class division between servant and master. The Count is called by Beaumarchais's own given name, Pierre-Augustin, suggesting that the author should be more closely identified with the aristocracy than with the lower orders. In Moggie Douglas's designs, he and Figaro are, for much of the play, dressed in similar suits, so that the gradations of social hierarchy have almost no visual manifestation. Equally, the housekeeper, Marceline, is dressed almost as sumptuously as her mistress. At one point, we even see the Countess dancing with the butler.

Everything tends towards making class irrelevant.

The problem with this is that The Marriage of Figaro without class distinctions is about as meaningful as Lady Chatterly's Lover without sex or Juno and the Paycock without poverty.

The great last act of the play, where servant and mistress exchange roles and voices and the class system is satirised as a hollow charade is reduced to the level of a bedroom farce, a mere mechanical exercise in moving bodies on and off stage.

This is not to say that Brian Brady's production doesn't give lots of sheen to the polished surfaces. He is one of the few directors who seem at home on the Abbey stage which he occupies here with confidence and invention. Helped considerably by Moggie Douglas's clever and elegant sets, the action moves both quickly and lightly. This ease of movement is partly due to a commendable command of pace, but partly, alas, to the fact that it carries a very light burden of thought, humour or emotion.

Sailing in such shallow waters, the performances from Andrew Bennett as Figaro, Karen Ardiff as Suzanne, Nick Dunning as the Count and Anna Healy as the Countess can do little more than keep on an even keel, which they all do with admirable poise. It is significant, though, that the most memorable performances - from Brendan Cauldwell and Des Cave - are in cameo parts, where any hint of profundity would be out of place. That should never be true of a play that is, after all, a key moment in the development of European culture.