LOVE À LA MODE AFTER MACKLIN
By Charles Macklin
Adapted and Directed by Colm Summers
KNAVES
Smock Alley Theatre · Dublin
Scene + Heard · Boys’ School · February 2017
Smock Alley Main Stage · 2017
ABOUT
In 1759, Irish actor and playwright Charles Macklin premiered Love à la Mode, a comedy in which an Englishman, an Irishman, a Scotsman and a fashionable fop compete for the hand and fortune of a wealthy young woman.
More than 250 years later, we brought it back to Smock Alley Theatre.
Love à la Mode After Macklin began at Scene + Heard in Smock Alley’s Boys’ School in February 2017 before being developed into a subsequent production on Smock Alley’s Main Stage.
The project was both a piece of theater and an experiment in theatrical archaeology: could we take a comedy written for the eighteenth-century Dublin and London stage and find a contemporary performance language for it without treating the play as a museum object? Our answer was to lean into everything unruly about it.
CREATIVE TEAM
CAST / ENSEMBLE
MAIN STAGE PRODUCTION
ORIGINAL MUSIC / TEXT
MAIN STAGE PRODUCTION
Charlie M’Laughlin
Caitlin Scott
Morgan Cooke
Leonard Buckley
Honi Cooke
Norma Howard
Colm Gleeson
Fionn Foley
SCENE + HEARD COMPANY
Lenny Buckley
Honi Cooke
Morgan Cooke
Fionn Foley
Colm Gleeson
Dara Hoban
Norma Howard
Séamus Ryan
Caitlin Scott
Nicholas Johnson
Original Playwright
Charles Macklin
Adaptation / Director / Costume Design
Colm Summers
Dramaturg
David O’Shaughnessy
Producer
Michael Stone
Stage Management
Jennifer Aust
Associate Artist
Nick Johnson
Lighting Design
Dara Hoban
Set Design
Eugenia Genuchi
Assistant Costume Design
Annachiara Vispi
Music devised by KNAVES under the direction of
Seamus Ryan
Prologue
Colm Gleeson
Lenny Buckley
Seamus Ryan
Ciao Bella…
Seamus Ryan
An Irishman’s Fear
Lenny Buckley
Let Other Men Sing…
Seamus Ryan
Lenny Buckley
Epilogue
Seamus Ryan
CHARLES MACKLIN
Charles Macklin was an Irish actor, playwright and theater-maker who became one of the major figures of the eighteenth-century British and Irish stage.
Born in Ireland around the end of the seventeenth century, Macklin built an extraordinarily long career as both actor and playwright.
Love à la Mode premiered in 1759.
At its center is an unusual intervention in the theatrical representation of Irishness. Macklin takes the familiar figure of the comic Stage Irishman and reverses it. Sir Callaghan O’Brallaghan, the Irish suitor, is allowed to emerge as the sincere figure inside a comedy populated by national and social stereotypes. Rather than simply reproduce Macklin’s eighteenth-century reversal, we asked what it meant for a contemporary Irish company to inherit and perform those stereotypes more than two centuries later.
RESEARCH + PERFORMANCE
Love à la Mode After Macklin was created in direct conversation with academic research into Macklin, eighteenth-century theater and representations of Irishness on the English stage.
The project accompanied the Ireland, Enlightenment and the English Stage, 1740–1820 conference at Trinity College Dublin’s Long Room Hub.
The production was supported by research and funding structures including the European Commission’s Marie Curie programme, Trinity College Dublin’s Provost’s Visual and Performing Arts Fund, the Faculty of Arts, Humanities and Social Sciences, and the School of English.
SUPPORT
European Commission Marie Curie Programme
Provost’s Visual and Performing Arts Fund, Trinity College Dublin
Faculty of Arts, Humanities and Social Sciences, Trinity College Dublin
School of English, Trinity College Dublin
D’Arcy Goldman
Donna Scott