I love everything that is old

And so to the theatre. In yet another attempt to pretend that I don't just make this up as I go along, yesterday's post was headed with a quote by Oliver Goldsmith and today's is about his play 'She Stoops to Conquer'. This is the latest production by Northern Broadsides and unusually, possibly uniquely, for them contains no clog dancing. Their last offering, 'An August Bank Holiday Lark' was of course actually about clog dancing - a subject that Bazza and his men had seemingly been working towards for many years - and perhaps that's it and there will be no more. It does however contain music and director and composer Conrad Nelson has chosen to mimic opera of the late 18th century to accompany Goldsmith's comedy from the same period. In fact on two occasions he directly quotes a short passage from 'The Magic Flute'.

It's a very well structured piece which probably accounts for it still being regularly performed in the twenty first century. And it is still funny, although perhaps not uproariously so. Nelson chooses to portray Tony Lumpkin as very camp rather than the simple but sly rustic that I have seen before and it works well. It's all acted to a high standard as you would expect from Northern Broadsides and I recommend it if the tour comes anywhere near you.

Two further thoughts. Firstly, I see from the programme that Bazza intends to give us his Lear next spring. I for one can't wait, it's a part made for a man never knowingly under-hammed. Secondly, the authors of the two plays I've seen this week also shared an outlook on society. Goldsmith, of course, wrote in his poem 'The Deserted Village':

“Ill fares the land, to hastening ills a prey 

Where wealth accumulates and men decay”