REVIEW: LOVERS’ VOWS by Elizabeth Inchbald at Jack Studio Theatre until 1 February 2025

‘A play which features in Jane’s Austen’s Mansfield Park’ ★★★

I pounced on this 1798 play with glee because it features prominently in Jane Austen’s Mansfield Park (1814) a novel I know very well. In the novel it serves as a symbol of decadence as the bored young people decide to stage a play while the master of the house is away. It must have been very popular in its day because Austen clearly expects her readers to be familiar with it as her characters argue about casting and begin to rehearse.

In fact the “shock horror” factor is even more ironic than I had ever previously realised because it’s a very harmless little play – written at a time when people were more frank and much less prudish than they were fifty years later once the Victorian age was firmly underway.

We’re in Germany and Europe is at war. Agatha (Kate Glover, who founded this company in 1997 to stage historically interesting plays) is destitute because she once bore an illegitimate child to a local nobleman who abandoned her. Then, after a five year absence her soldier son, Frederick (Matthew Thomason) turns up and they are reunited. He does what he can to make her comfortable with the assistance of a cottager (Richard Ward) and his wife (Hilary Field). Inevitably, then the (conveniently widowed) Baron (John Craggs) moves back to his nearby castle with his daughter Amelia (Emma Riches). He plans to marry her to Count Cassel (John Craggs) who is absurd and hilariously undesirable in the tradition of a Shakesperean comic but she is in love with the local cleric (Edmund Digby Jones). The count and his household are served by a butler (Gareth Pilkington) who writes poetry. Of course, after a few hitches, we get a Mozartian “suo padre” moment because Frederick is the product of that long ago liaison between the Baron and Agatha who are reunited to give us a happy ending. It would make a good comic opera. Has anyone, I wonder, ever done it? 

This production feels wooden and pedestrian at the beginning – although I saw it very early in the run so there may have been nervousness which showed. There is too much standing still and speaking lines. It gets better as it settles though, especially in the second half. Amongst its quite large (for fringe theatre) cast there are some strong performances. Digby Jones stands out as Mr Anhalt, passionately in love but suppressing it and trying to help others as a decent clergyman would. And Emma Riches gets exactly the right tone and body language for an early eighteenth century young woman who knows her own mind.

I’m very glad to have seen Lovers’ Vows, at last. Next time I reread Mansfield Park I shall see it in a whole new light.

Photography: Paddy Gormley

LOVERS’ VOWS by Elizabeth Inchbald at Jack Studio Theatre 21 January – 1 February 2025

BOX OFFICE https://brockleyjack.co.uk/jackstudio-entry/lovers-vows/ 

Directed by Kenneth Michaels

Produced by Historia Theatre Company