A delightfully energetic farce, London Assurance is pure entertainment and, under Nicholas Hytner's direction, a joy from start to finish. Sir Harcourt Courtly, a sixty year-old fop, leaves London for a country estate in order to marry the young Grace, niece to Max Harkaway, who at eighteen and haughtily dismissive of love, has committed to marrying Courtly in order to retain her inheritance. Arriving separately and in disguise, Courtly's son, Charles, falls in love with Grace and, along with the hanger-on Dazzle, hatches a plan to divert his father's attention and gain Grace's hand in marriage. Enter Lady Gay Spanker, stealing the show with her exuberant gaiety and hilarious obsession with hunting, to ensnare Courtly and allow young love to flourish.
The conventional happy ending retains a pleasing bite as we realise that Grace's pairing with Charles is not a simple triumph of love over money and duty. Charles inherits the wealth promised to his father if Courtly doesn't marry Grace and so, by choosing Charles, she dodges the unsavoury poser for a younger model in this marriage market. The play is replete with references to the 'mercantile' ways of the world and, although written over 150 years ago, it raises many a knowingly ironic laugh – Dazzle owes numerous debts but assures his creditors that their money will be safer with him than in the Bank of England. Much hilarity ensues as a result of the town/country divide, with the rural dwellers perceiving the Londoners to be vain and vacuous, and the urbanites thinking the country-folk to be nothing more than ignorant hicks with an unnatural predilection for riding horses.
The real reason to go and see this production is not the quality of the play itself; although a neat and entertaining diversion, it would be nothing without a superb cast of comic actors. And here is a superb cast indeed which brings together Fiona Shaw as Lady Spanker and Simon Russell Beale as Courtly – both are outrageous and work so inimitably well together that they could carry the play by themselves. The real treat is that Shaw and Beale are the prize jewels in a glittering crown; the support from the likes of Nick Sampson as Cool and Richard Briers as Lady Spanker's downtrodden husband is first-class. I would be reluctant to see another production of this play in the future, I think we have the definitive version here and I urge you to see it. I doubt it will ever be this good again.
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