Lovers' Vows

Elizabeth Inchbald after August von Lotzebue
Historia Theatre Company
The Jack Studio Theatre

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Edmund Digby-Jones and Emma Riches Credit: Paddy Gormley
Gareth Pilkington, Richard Ward, John Craggs kneeling Matthew Thomason Credit: Paddy Gormley
Kate Glover and Matthew Thomason Credit: Paddy Gormley
Matthew Thomason and Emma Riches Credit: Paddy Gormley
Harry Saks and Edmund Digby-Jones Credit: Paddy Gormley
Hilary Field, Kate Glover and Richard Ward Credit: Paddy Gormley

The 18th century’s Elizabeth Inchbald is best known as a novelist, although she was able to support herself well as a playwright, often translating and adapting work from French and German sources.

Lovers’ Vows is one of the latter, and was a hugely successful play in its day—as the 19th century hove into view—and it is a testament to her and original author August von Lotzebue’s talents that it remains an enjoyably comic piece in spite of how much moralising there is in this tale of love, abandonment and honour.

It sees young soldier Frederick return home on leave to be told by his now-destitute and ailing mother, Agatha, that he is illegitimate. She reveals that, twenty years earlier, as a young lord of the manor, Baron Wildenhaim had seduced her with promises of love and all sorts but left her pregnant and without means when he went off to war, eventually marrying and settling elsewhere.

Agatha raised a son of moral rectitude and kindness, and Frederick lodges his mother with some jolly yokels, through whom we discover that, to the joy of the villagers, the Baron, now a widower, is back living in his castle in Wildenhaim. With him is his daughter, Amelia, whom he would see well-married to the obnoxious and womanising Count Cassel, their house guest.

These wrongs being righted, as we know they must, is facilitated by the Baron being a bit of a pushover having borne for decades a guilt over the abandonment of his true love, and his promise that he would not have his daughter marry against her will.

Thanks to these rehabilitative features, the authority of his aristocratic position is not entirely demolished when he has to flip-flop, with Frederick morally strongarming the Baron into a happy ending for Agatha, albeit perhaps not entirely satisfactory by today’s standards, and Amelia’s manoeuvring of her chosen one, the vicar Mr Anhalt, into position of husband-to-be in the eyes of the Baron.

In this production of Lovers' Vows, the greatest pleasure is to be found in the scenes involving Edmund Digby-Jones and Emma Riches as Anhalt and Amelia. This Anhalt is comically endearing as he grapples with inexpressible love for the unattainable Amelia, whilst Riches sparkles as the witty and plotting Amelia.

Their love crosses social boundaries echoing that between the Baron and Agatha, but whereas the Baron misuses Agatha, Amelia and Anhalt are all good things. She remains devoted to but outsmarts her father, and Anhalt's honour and wise counsel surpass his station and win over the old codger.

Agatha and Frederick‘s quietly heroic actions and the yokels’ generosity of spirit in taking in the moribund Agatha (a nice comic turn from Hilary Field as the cottager's wife) put the aristocratic classes’ cravenness and lack of charity into a poor light.

The shenanigans of Lovers’ Vows may seem rather irrelevant to today’s less class-driven societies, but in some core respects, they reflect our present position.

What we can see in both the village of Wildenhaim and in the the present day is that people in a position of power can and do behave unguided by a moral compass, particularly in respect of their treatment of women, and, in the case of Cassel, with impunity, there being no risk of opprobrium or being called to account by their peers.

Two hundred years on, we must still put our hope in the Fredericks, Anhalts and Amelias to keep talking back to power with honesty and integrity and bring about change.

Reviewer: Sandra Giorgetti

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