Would a rare invitation to a staging of a 17th-century court entertainment be rich with sea monsters and dancing witches?
Theatregoers are rarely treated like royalty. Getting a seat with a decent view of the stage is generally the height of my ambition. A decently priced interval drink is usually out of the question. All of which made it particularly satisfying to be invited to witness a long-lost royal entertainment from the court of James I. This was the work of a young company called Jericho House, which is launching a season at the artfully dilapidated ex-music hall in London's East End, Wilton's. As well as putting on a new play by Jonathan Holmes in the summer, the company is performing The Tempest at the Barbican ? supposedly the first time the play will have been performed with the music originally scored for it. But several months before all that came an altogether different work, near-contemporaneous with Shakespeare's play: a long-unperformed court masque, Love Freed from Ignorance and Folly, put on last week as a fundraising exercise to support the rest of the season.
I admit to anorak-ish enthusiasm on the topic of masques, but they are one of the great unsolved mysteries of English theatre: plays that were specially commissioned for the royal court, for one night only, at fabulous, eye-watering expense. They reached their apogee in the early 17th century, at the behest of James and Charles I, and in the hands of two of the greatest artists of the period, playwright Ben Jonson and architect/designer Inigo Jones. Despite the self-congratulatory brief ? masques were a little like the office Christmas panto, with courtiers performing paeans of praise to themselves, before vomiting over their shoes ? Jonson and Jones created stunningly elaborate multimedia spectaculars that would make anything by Complicite or James Cameron look pallid by comparison.
At least that's the theory: no one is quite sure, because masques are almost never performed, for the straightforward reason that they're more or less impossible to stage. Jonson's scripts survive, as do Jones's costume and set drawings, but what they left behind points to the utter irrecoverability of the enterprise. One, The Masque of Queens (1609), contains not merely an extensive explanatory essay from Jonson, but detailed notes on dizzying stage effects (a hell with flames, dancing witches, the appearance of a "glorious and magnificent building" supporting 12 actors). Another requires a wooded landscape, an artificial sea, a small bevy of tritons and sea monsters, plus an enormous illuminated shell, out of which the dancers were required to emerge. And that's before you even get to the speaking parts.
So you'll understand why I bolted down my Jacobean meatfeast (a banquet was part of the deal) to see what Jericho House would come up with. In the end, quite a lot: they had a team of dancers trained by a baroque choreographer, a large period band, and had even roped in the wonderful early-music soprano Emma Kirkby, who delivered some of the musical numbers with airy grace. The drama itself was trickier to judge. The text had been cut to the bare minimum, presumably on the basis that this wasn't what we'd come for ? judging by the expensively tailored couple sat behind me who chuntered all the way through. And an already arcane plot (I won't bore you, though it's here) was reduced to near-incomprehensibility when Janet Suzman strode on and delivered a chunk of The Tempest.
There were tantalising glimmers of what might have been: the muscular verve of Jonson's words, the poise and finesse of the dancers, the clack of high-heel shoes (both boys and girls) on the wooden stage. Tuning out the rumblings of the DLR and blocking out the fire-exit signs, we might almost have been there. In the end it wasn't quite enough; this masque remains a mystery. But it did make me think: what would happen if someone put one of these on for real, tritons, sea monsters, witches and all? Maybe we should get the recession out of the way first, though. And the royal wedding.
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