Frederick J.H. Darton (1878–1936)

WHEN CRUMMLES PLAYED, BEING THE FULL ORIGINAL TEXT OF LILLO'S TRAGEDY OF THE LONDON MERCHANT, OR GEORGE BARNWELL, ACTED BY MR. VINCENT CRUMMLES'S COMPANY AT THE LYRIC THEATRE, HAMMERSMITH, UNDER THE DIRECTION OF MR. NIGEL PLAYFAIR, by Nigel Playfair, George Lillo, with an introduction by F.J. Harvey Darton.

This is a 1927 play which incorporates a 1731 play and wraps it in a frame of characters from Charles Dickens's NICHOLAS NICKLEBY. I read it as research but ended up quite intrigued by the entire thing, much more so than I expected.

In Dickens's great novel NICHOLAS NICKLEBY, young Nicholas and his friend Smike are taken in and warmly treated by the theatrical company of Vincent Crummles, who with his troupe of players tours England putting on entertainments. Dickens wrote from some knowledge of these traveling players, and the Crummles section is one of the most vivid of the novel.

In 1927, Nigel Playfair, the actor-manager of the Lyric Theatre in Hammersmith, London, created a framework for a play in which Vincent Crummles, Nicholas Nickleby, and others of Dickens's creations would perform an entire play typical of the period of which Dickens wrote and do so in the style of that time. Playfair chose George Lillo's 1731 play THE LONDON MERCHANT, OR THE HISTORY OF GEORGE BARNWELL for his Dickensians to play, and wrapped it snuggly in the playlet in which the Crummles troupe is depicted. THE LONDON MERCHANT was a huge success in its day, a moral melodrama based on the true story of a young merchant apprentice led by a wicked woman into dishonor, theft, and murder. Written in a high-flown style resembling iambic pentameter, the play's dialog is nothing like human speech, yet while not reaching near to Shakespeare's lofty phrasing, still compels with rich musicality even in its simplistic moral tones.

The book contains a long essay on the traveling theatrical troupes of the 18th and early 19th centuries, and the material of the play itself is something of a time machine to a period very little known today, even to those who live the theatrical life. Expecting little but historical drudgery, I was surprised to find myself caught up in the imagery of an ancient tradition, and wondering at how far the theatre has come and how much alike it still is to its ancestor.… (more)