Restoring the Repertoire productions

Black Eyed Susan

11 - 22 September 2008
a nautical melodrama written by Douglas Jerrold in 1829
directed by Colin Blumenau
designed by Kit Surrey

Black Eyed Susan was not only the Theatre Royal’s first fully staged Restoring the Repertoire play, but also the re-opening production for the restored playhouse. It was the perfect opportunity to show the Regency Theatre in context, dressed with the type of set it was designed for and with a lost melodrama, unseen for more than 100 years.

Even better, the play was unashamedly populist, promising high entertainment with music, dance, humour and spectacle, with an endearing love story at its heart. It was the perfect play to appeal to all audiences coming to see the restored building.

The play was written by playwright Douglas Jerrold, former sailor and writer for the satirical magazine Punch. Set at the end of the Napoleonic wars it tells the story of Susan whose husband William is away at sea and who falls on hard times. William returns a nautical hero and saves her from poverty, her crooked landlord and from the amorous advances of his drunken Captain. Despite his valour he is court-martialled for attacking a senior officer and is only saved from hanging in the nick of time by a sudden plot twist.

Underneath the familiar stock characters, songs and barnstorming, Black Eyed Susan had a strong vein of satirical criticism against the exploitation of women and the treatment of war heroes in Georgian Britain.

The Theatre Royal’s production of Black Eyed Susan was produced with a great amount of care, the spectacle of the stage counter-pointed with intimate moments of real emotion. The excesses of the Regency society by the time of the writing of the play had begun to become intolerable to some and for the first time Victorian values were beginning to appear. Black Eyed Susan comes right at the cusp of that change and provides a fascinating look at the society of the time, when social morals were being questioned, and where laughter, tears, love and tragedy could all co-exist very innocently on its stages.