“And how did you enjoy the play, Mrs Lincoln?” runs a famously tasteless quip. We’ll never know the answer, but this is the work that she and President Lincoln were watching on the night of his assassination at Ford’s theatre, Washington, 150 years ago. Written in 1851 by the prolific Tom Taylor, it turns out to be a jaunty comic melodrama astonishingly similar in style and tone to the work of Taylor’s Irish contemporary, Dion Boucicault.
Taylor was clearly a smart operator, since he realised London in 1851 would be packed with visitors to the Great Exhibition. Accordingly, he flatters them with a portrait of a rough-hewn but good-hearted Yankee hero coming to the rescue of a decaying English aristocracy. Asa Trenchard, the visitor from Vermont, may use a funny lingo and dispense ferocious cocktails, but he saves an impecunious Hampshire baronet from financial ruin and his daughter from a disastrous marriage. At the same time, Asa sacrifices his own fortune to marry a distant relative reduced to working as a dairymaid.
While being a successful dramatist, Taylor went on to become editor of Punch and you can see this in his somewhat heavy-handed humour and strenuous wordplay. The play’s most ostensibly comic character is Lord Dundreary, who makes the archetypal English silly-ass look positively moronic and who all too typically says of his putative fiancee: “Fetch Miss Georgina a pail of water – no she looks pale enough already.”
Fortunately, Taylor redeems himself in his portrait of the hero. Billed in advance as an “Apollo of the prairies”, he turns out to be a totally engaging figure who mocks the ingrained English class system, punctures pomposity and thwarts villainy. His presence saves the play, as well as the day, and has much the same impact as Groucho Marx might if he were suddenly to turn up in Downton Abbey.
In Lydia Parker’s production he is exuberantly played by Solomon Mousley who, with his rakishly angled felt hat and sharply cherubic features, resembles a young Mark Rylance.
Timothy Allsop struggles heroically with the laboriously unfunny Lord Dundreary and there is good support from Kelly Burke as the baronet’s vivacious daughter and Hannah Britland as a model of Victorian delicacy with a voracious appetite. Erika Gundesen also provides pleasant piano accompaniment to a play that survives as an amusing period piece, but is not exactly a work to die for.
• Until 14 April. Box office: 0844 847 1652. Venue: Finborough, London.
