All Aboard the Ship of Fools: Edward’s Boys’ production of John Marston’s The Fawn

In early October 2021, Edward’s Boys roared back to life with a remarkable production of John Marston’s The Fawn, directed with huge success by Perry Mills. Following the loss of the company’s production of The Silent Woman in March 2020, their return to the stage after long and difficult months of rehearsal during the pandemic was a morale-boosting and exciting theatrical event.

Once again, Edward’s Boys are making history – or, to be precise, theatre history. Marston’s The Fawn has been staged only three times since its first performances in c. 1604-5: at the National Theatre in 1983, in a Shakespeare’s Globe Read Not Dead staged reading in 2014, and now in Edward’s Boy’s latest production. That it should be a boys’ company bringing back this play is entirely apt since it was performed by not one but two seventeenth-century children’s companies, the Children of Queen’s Revels and later the Children of Pauls. The play was clearly good enough to be taken on by both companies and its neglect since then seems unfair given the meaty roles it offers for both male and female characters. This production proved yet again that the plays we often know least about can be remarkably entertaining.

The play centres on Hercules, Duke of Ferrara (played with grace and power by Felix Kerrison-Adams), who, like the Duke in Shakespeare’s contemporary Measure for Measure, abandons his dukedom in disguise. Rather than spying on his own people like Shakespeare’s Duke, Hercules infiltrates another court, going undercover as a non-royal like an ageing Prince Hal (see also Mike Bartlett’s King Charles III and every episode of The Windsors). Disguising himself as the flattering courtier Faunus, he exposes the intrigues and cruelties of the court of Gonzago, Duke of Urbino. In one of the production’s wittiest touches, Hercules dons his disguise in a beautifully poised moment of self-referentiality, whipping out a compact mirror to draw himself a pencil moustache which, with a wink to the audience, does the trick. And because Edward’s Boys’ productions are always expert in their use of their text, this moment draws the audience to Hercules and reminds us that the play is based on the belief that knowing ourselves can help us avoid foolishness – to paraphrase a current politician, ‘we’ should look in the mirror.

As with so many early modern plays, the central action is the courtship and marriage of a young couple (in this case Hercules’ son Tiberio and Gonzago’s daughter Dulcimel) who are blocked by an older man’s foolishness. The Fawn gives us two candidates for the senex role; the first is the grandiose windbag Gonzago, Duke of Urbino (Johan Valiaparambil made him both foolish and charming, no mean feat); the second is Hercules himself, who begins the play as Dulcimel’s intended husband despite being 45-odd years her senior. Hercules’s motives for his disguise and journey to Urbino are not entirely clear. He may be planning to marry Joe McCormack’s sharp, witty Dulcimel himself; she is something of a counterpart to Hercules, outwitting her father to get her own way, and in McCormack’s intensely watchable performance it was hard not to root for her. Alternatively, Hercules might dodge the creepy reality of the age-gap marriage he has himself arranged, perhaps working behind the scenes to encourage his son Tiberio to marry Dulcimel. Certainly Tiberio, as played by Greg Madden, needs a lot of help: there are lovely moments when the penny drops and he finally sees what’s been in front of him all along, delightedly climbing the tree to Dulcimel’s chamber, after Valiaparambil’s Gonzago has dashed back one more time to tell him absolutely not to climb it. Another possibility is that Hercules may simply be in the grip of a raging mid-life crisis, off to discover what others think about him and realising, early in the play that ‘I never knew till now how old I was’ (1.2.252). Any of these could be the reason, the ‘inciting incident’ for the play. Marston hints but never quite explains and it’s left to the audience and the actors to work this out together.

Regardless of why he’s there, once Hercules is disguised and in Urbino he becomes both spy and moral reformer, goading the courtiers into exposing their failings as they attack, objectify, and prey on each other. If the court women (Tom Howitt as Garbezza, Charlie Hutton as Donnetta, Ted Jowett as Puttota) aren’t actual princesses or philosophers (like Jed Trimmel’s Philocalia), they’re treated as fair game for exploitation by the men, each of whom has their own idiosyncrasy. Jamie Mitchell’s Zuccone is a rage-filled woman-hater whose wife Zoya tames him by tricking him into thinking she’s pregnant by another man (excellent cushion work by Callum Maughan). Joseph Foley’s Amoroso is a coughing, hawking hypochondriac whose respiratory antics sent a shiver down every spine in the audience. Granuffo, the Duke’s silent counsellor, at first seems to be a character with a disability but is revealed at the end as a politician who is so non-committal that he says nothing at all. Huge credit has to go to Zephan Lacey-Rousou as Granuffo. With only two lines, hours of stage time, and a pivotal role as silent straight man to the rambling, self-satisfied Gonzago, this is not an easy part. Lacey-Rousou pulled it off expertly, deploying a range of gestures and facial expressions that neatly suggested the superficiality of someone promoted above their abilities. All these offenders get their comeuppance in a theatrical Court of Love where they are publicly arraigned and shamed by Cupid (a debut for a brilliantly mischievous Rufus Round) for crimes against love – for which read crimes against women and, let’s face it, against essential human decency.

The poster for the production, designed by David Troughton who also designed the set, is a charismatic riff on the topos of the Ship of Fools. This image looms over the play. It is made real in the entertainment-within-the-play at the end and is beautifully realised in Troughton’s stage set, which gives us the closed, class-riven world of a cruise liner in the 1920s. If audience members recalled recent pandemic stories of infected cruise ships, this ship and the society it represented likewise offered no escape. While the set elegantly demonstrated that all inside it are fools (perhaps including we the audience), it also led to some delicious moments. With the pun ‘A Band On Ship’, we’re reminded of the huge importance of music to Edward’s Boys’ productions and treated to a talented group of musicians under the direction of Luke Cherry. We get a nod to Titanic from Herod and Nymphadoro (how could they not?). There’s a frankly delightful chorus line of dancing waiters – huge credit goes to the chorus members. The excellent Callum Maughan as Zoya gives us a ‘goddess moment’ in the spotlight, one that every human should experience no matter what their gender, and slays Zoya’s admirers with a brilliantly delivered rendition of the very disturbing ‘My Heart Belongs to Daddy’ that conjures Hayworth, Monroe and Madonna’s ‘Material Girl’. After the interval we have a massage table as the physical emblem for Hercules’ manipulation of everyone around him – all, of course, to the tune of ‘I’ve Got You Under My Skin’. The Ship of Fools itself was brought to the stage using nothing more than the bodies, buckets and mops of the deck-swabbers of the chorus, an excellent summation of the movement work of Struan Leslie and Laura Dredger that brought the chorus into full effect throughout the play.

This setting also gave the production real dimension heft. Ewan Craig’s Herod was realised as a boor in a safari suit with a pipe and walrus moustache, a minor Kitchener knock-off who bullies all around him. Will Grove’s Nymphadoro became an elegant, cigarette-smoking, Noel Coward-esque figure of apparent wit who in fact shallowly concealed his genuine mean spiritedness and who delighted in causing suffering to those more vulnerable than himself. Craig and Groves brilliantly conveyed the sense of public school privilege that brought these two cowards together to carp at others from the sidelines, and they also distinguished sharply between the two. They were an unforgettable pair and when they sauntered on stage at the start of 1.2 on the last night of the run, the audience were with them before they had even said a word.

As was clear from the production, The Fawn is not a twee or jolly play. It is genuinely funny – especially in this production – but much of the laughter it generates is at the expense of characters who thinks they’re laughing at the expense of someone else. There are scenes, the meeting of Faunus, Herod and Nymphodoro in 1.2 in particular, that reminded me entirely of Tina Fey’s Mean Girls. The Fawn shows us in-crowds, flattery, bullying, scapegoating, and misogyny, and much of it involves watching groups of inadequate men exploiting those around them, particularly the women. What’s important, though, is that Marston dismantles misogyny by making it the weapon of choice for men who conspicuously fail to measure up. His characters continually damn themselves with their own words and we are meant to judge them. Nymphadoro praises Faunus with the words, ‘Why that’s my humour to the very thread; thou dost speak my proper thoughts’ (3.1.18-19), a warning against the risks of believing people because they seem to agree with us. And there are moments of genuine cruelty. When Hercules sends Zuccone over the edge and sits with us in the audience to watch the other man’s sobbing breakdown we’re asked to consider our own complicity with his scheming and to wonder what it is really meant to achieve.

The Fawn is full of shocking moments and, as the best theatre does, this production pushed the audience to think critically. For instance, in Act 3 Nymphadoro gives us a catalogue of women he professes to love. This begins – we’re to assume – humorously, with jibes at women who are chaste or not chaste, women who are valued for their minds and those valued for their bodies, women who are tall or short, women who are old or young. This is the low-grade misogyny we often encounter in early modern plays and, at first, it seems as if the production is saying that we should accept it with a complacent laugh. But the tone changes with Nymphadoro’s final declaration that he will love every woman ‘be she young or old, lean, fat, short, tall, white, red, brown, nay, even black’ (3.1.34-5). Will Groves leant hard on the final words, making sure that they were heard and their full meaning acknowledged. He refused to offer his character any cover for his appalling ideas, but instead pushed the audience to listen, making sure that Nymphadoro’s venality was clear to all watching. On the Friday evening a predominantly younger audience (perhaps members of the school?) responded with an audible, lasting gasp of genuine shock at what they had heard – we were no longer on Nymphadoro’s side.

If this sounds intense, it was, but it was also handled with grace and wit. The production even ramped up on Saturday night, ending the run on a high note. With the action over and the fate of the characters wrapped up, Callum Maughan took to the microphone and the musicians again took centre stage. Marston was an Inn of Court member and as an in-joke he reworked an old Christmas revels into Cupid’s Court of Love. We, in turn, were treated to a perfectly pitched in-joke with a riff on Cole Porter’s ‘Let’s Do It’ that called on teachers, company members, and Nadhim Zahawi among others. This was the sharpest and warmest way to close a beautifully directed production that would be remarkable even if it hadn’t happened against a background of bubbles, LFT tests, and loss. Yet again, Edward’s Boys’ have shown us the importance of both theatre and community.