The idea to choose She stoops to conquer worked well for the students of Department of English, Thiagarajar College, as they effectively brought out the class consciousness of that period, well established by the character Mr. Hardcastle.
Hardcastle is passionate after things that are old. For him, “old friends, old times, old manners, old books, old wines and his ‘old’ wife” are indeed fashionable things in the world. On the contrary, his wife hates anything old she finds. She is materialistic and appears to assess a person by the value of the wealth he or she possesses. Despite her misguided values, she loves her husband while Hardcastle too is willing to look beyond her foibles.
The comedy revolves around the gap between the characters’ attempts to preserve standards of polite behaviour that contrasts to their true behaviour. As the title indicates there are several ‘stooping’ moments of various characters in the play. Marlow stoops physically to win the heart of Kate while Kate stoops socially to win the heart of Marlow. Both Hastings and Neville, on the other hand, have moral stooping en route their love and marriage.
The play ridicules the craze for fashion in Mrs. Hardcastle, the pampered child in Tony Lumpkin, who loves to lead an epicurean life and the dual personality in Marlow, who has a bizarre tendency to speak with exaggerated timidity to "modest" women, while speaking in lively and hearty tones to women of low-class.
Mistaken identities bring out the comedy. Marlow mistakes Mr. Hardcastle to be the owner of the inn and Kate as a maid and ensures laughter all around with his rude behaviour.
“We staged skits in the past and this is the first time we attempted a full-length play on stage. We have created a theatre group Stage Sculptors and hope to make this a regular event,” says V. Subathra Devi, Head of the Department.
The director could have cut short long dialogue portions. “It is a play written in five acts and we found it extremely difficult to strike down dialogues. For, most of the plays written during the period were dialogue oriented and comedy gets killed when they are shortened,” says C. Ramya Ravikmar, director of the play.
The stage looked too cramped as characters jostled for space when they were in action. Especially in the scene at the alehouse, ‘Three Pigeons’, where the actors struggled to find space for dancing. Also girls carrying love symbol to announce cupid’s arrow strikes in every romantic sequence was an eyesore. The team did well with the music composition and dance choreographs. The lights fell out of place and the team failed to move stage properties around. For instance, the fireplace remained fixed both for the alehouse and Hardcaslte’s house scenes. The team missed the trick as they could have moved the fireplace to differentiate the places.
Mrs. Hardcastle played by R Brindha (II B.A.), Kate donned by R Abiha (II M.A.) and Tony Lumpkin by A K Selvaraja (III B.A.) were outstanding.
Keeping the audience, who are alien to the 18th century English language and culture, in good spirit for 140 minutes is tough task, which the team did to satisfaction.
