Life
1747-1843, b. 24 June, Abbey St., Dublin; ed. Jesuit father called Father
Austin; became good classical and French scholar; studied under West at
Dub. Royal Acad., and started acting in priv. theatricals; went to London
in 1762-64, greatly admiring Garrick; actor and playwright in Dublin,
1764; under Mossop at Smock Alley, 12 years; The She-Gallant (1767),
farce, successful in Dublin; apparently saw Goldsmith’s She Stoops
to Conquer in Cork, and wrote a farce, Tony Lumpkin’s Rambles
Thro’ Cork (17 Sept. 1773), with which he toured through Ireland
- and later adapted as Tony Lumpkin in Town (Haymarket 8 Aug. 1779);
married [1774], and moved to London in 1777; farces & comic operas,
viz Tony Lumpkin in Town (Haymarket 1778), a sequel to Goldsmith’s
She Stoops to Conquer, sent anon. to Colman; The Son-in-Law
(Haymarket Aug. 1779), a success in London and Dublin; collection of fifty
pieces published in 1798; Dead Alive (June 1781); The Agreeable
Surprise (Haymarket 1781), the last written in his own hand, admired
by Hazlitt, who called him ‘the English Molière [...] in light,
careless laughter, and pleasant exaggeration of the humorous, we have
no equal to him’; The Banditti, comic opera (Covent Garden,
Nov. 1781), failed, but successfuly revived as The Castle of Andalusia
(Nov. 1782); The She-Gallant produced as The Positive Man
(Cov. Gdn. March 1782); The Lord Mayor’s Day (Nov. 1782); The
Maid is the Mistress (Feb 1783); also Wild Oats (1791) [publ.
1792], much revived in London, and version by Tom MacIntyre, Abbey 1977;
The Wicklow Gold Mine, opera (1796 [Dublin 1814 FDA]), revised
as The Wicklow Mountains; unpublished The Shamrock or St Patrick’s
Day (1777); retired from acting blind; d. Southhampton, Feb. 4. The
Dramatic Works of John O’Keeffe, Esq 4 vols., (London: T. Woodfall
1798); Recollections of the Life of John O’Keeffe, 2 vols.
(London: H Colbourn 1826). O’Keeffe’s Legacy to His Daughters
(1834), poems and recollections. PORT, There is a portrait of 1786 by
Thomas Lawranson in the National Portrait Gallery, London [BREF]. FDA1
lists the 1st Dublin eds. of Tony Lumpkin in Town as 1780, and
The Poor Soldier as 1789; Thomas Moore acknowledged indebtedness
to O’Keeffe’s Irish songs in the first vol. of his Poetical
Works; claims to have written 68 pieces for the theatre. DNB DIW
DIL PI OCEL CAB RAF ODQ FDA OCIL
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Works
The Generous Lovers, unacted and unprinted; acted under Mossop
and others for 12 years; 1774, m. Mary Heaphy, dg. of Tottenham H., Irish
actor; Sept. 1780; The She-Gallant, later called The Positive
Man [1782]; moved to London, 1777; Tony Lumpkin in Town, or The
Dilettante, produced Haymarket 2 July 1778; Dublin, Spring 1779 [FDA
1780], he finished The Son-in-Law, produced Haymarket, Aug. 1779;
[FDA Dublin 1783] The Dead Alive [Dublin 1873], based in The
Arabian Nights, followed by The Agreeable Surprise, farce (1781;
[Newry 1783]. The Banditti, or Love’s Labyrinth (Nov. 1781),
com. op., has music by Carolan and other Irish players. Recollections
notes that the inclusion of the songs ‘Voorneen Deelish Elleen Oge’,
and ‘Erin go Bra’, at that time known only by its Irish words,
had no saving effect.’ RB Sheridan, attending the first performance
with him, advised cutting the part of Agnes. The Shamrock, or St. Patrick’s
Day (Crow St. 15 Apr 1777), a piece for the Order, lately founded,
included Carolan airs which he had selected as ‘never before heard
by an English public; and which he incorporated in the less ephemeral
The Poor Soldier, com op. (CG 1783; printed 1785) [Shamock called
unpub. by Field Day Anthology, gen. ed. Seamus Deane,
(Derry: Field Day 1991), Vol. 1, p.657, which however defers to Kavanagh].
The Castle of Andalusia (CG 1782) and Fountainbleu (1784)
[add. bibl., Fountainbleu, or, our way in France (Dublin 1790),
so listed in Leerrssen, op. cit., 1986, bibl. (p.512)] were two popular
com. operas; Wild Oats (1791 [Dublin 1791]). Hazlitt wrote, ‘In
light, careless laughter, and pleasant exaggerations of the humorous,
we have had no one one equal him.’ (Lects. on the English Comic
Writers, 1869). Kavanagh discusses separately Wild Oats and
The Agreeable Suprise, and remarks, ‘O’Keeffe is not
remembered today as a writer of comedy. His fame is entirely resting on
his brilliance as a writer of farce.’ [357] Field Day Anthology,
gen. ed. Seamus Deane, (Derry: Field Day 1991), Vol. 1 adds
a selection, purportedly from Kavanagh, but incl. Valentine and Orson;
or, the Wild Man of Orleans (London 1795).
Reprints, Christopher Wheatley & Kevin Donovan, eds., Irish Drama of the Seventeeth and Eighteenth Centuries, 2 vols. (UK: Ganesha Publishing UK 2003) [incls. The Poor Soldier (1782) and The Wicklow Mountains (1798)].
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Criticism
Karen J. Harvey and Kevin B Pry, ‘John O’Keeffe as an Irish
Playwright within the Theatrical, Social and Economic Context of his Time,’
in Eire-Ireland XXII, I (Spring 1987), p.19-43; Christopher Wheatley, Beneath Ierne’s Banners: Irish Protestant Drama of the Restoration and Eighteenth century (Notre Dame UP 1999) [q.pp.].
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Commentary
G. C. Duggan, The Stage Irishman (1937), Few of his plays
had any vogue in Dublin, catering to English and (increasingly) American
audience tired of false sentimentality. Hazlitt called him the English
Moliere, but his fast moving farces seem deplorably flat; yet ‘he
cannot be neglected ... indeed his Irish plays and Irish characters explain
clearly the nemesis which overtook the Irishman on the nineteenth century
stage.’[143] ALSO, His opera The Shamrock, with ‘its
Irish characters and customs, pipers and fairies, football players and
gay hurlers’, and replete with Carolan’s airs, is missing [i.e.,
unpublished]. His Irish plays are, The Poor Soldier (1782); The
Prisoner at Large (1788); The Wicklow Mines or Lad of the Hills
(1795); and Love in a Camp, or Patrick in Prussia, the sequel to
The Poor Soldier, though set abroad (1785). ALSO, The Poor Soldier,
set at Carton, with the Duke of Leinster’s house as backdrop; an
Irish soldier returns from the West Indies to find his fiancée
Norah being wooed by Capt. Fitzroy; all ends happily when turns out the
soldier saved the Captain in Carolina (US), and a captaincy is bestowed
on him to save him from the anger of the priest who agreed to the other’s
marriage; as a subplot, Darby is wooing Kathlane, effectually and practically,
in comparison with Dermot’s soppy sentimentalism. In the sequel,
Patrick in Prussia is serving Marshall Fehrbellin in Prussia while
Norah is in the keeping of Fr. Luke in Berlin; Darby, having been jilted
by Kathlane [sic], has sold his farm and gone wandering, and is on the
point of being flogged when Patrick rescues him; a love intrigue between
the Capt. and Flora ensues, and is unravelled when Norah arrives on the
scene; Darby evasions fuel the complications of the plot which includes
Flora’s flirtation in cross-dress with Norah. The agreeable priest,
not entirely a toper, extracts a bottle of Drogheda whisky from an unwilling
donor. ALSO, The Prisoner at Large; Lord Esmond has fallen into
the hands of a gang of crooks through gambling in Paris; discovering that
Count Fripon has gone to his Killarney estate to collect his rents, he
secretly returns with Trap, his custodian, and makes himself known to
Jack Connor, the young farmer who has persuaded the tenants not to pay,
and also to Miss Adelaide, to whom he was married ten years before. According
to his Recollections (1826), the plot is based on facts encountered
by O’Keeffe when in the year 1768 an innkeeper in Antrim pointed
out to him a Frenchman trying to collect rent in the manner of Count Fripon.
FURTHER, The Wicklow Gold Mines, a comic opera with a thin plot,
set in Arklow, and interesting as an attempt to describe Irish country
life. The central char. is Felix, ‘lad of the hills’, a devil
may care suspected of robbing the coach; other characters are Rosa, the
shop-keeping cottager, Billy, her suitor; Sulivan, the Schoolmaster, post-master,
and part-owner of a fishing fleet; the Squire who drives down from Merrion
Square; his bailiff, Redmond O’Hanlon, who pursues Billy and Felix
in their capacities as poachers. Redmond himself sings, ‘In Antrim
I was a Heart of Steel, in Clonmel I was a White Boy.’ contemporary
Dublin life, ‘The elegant delights of Dublin - plays, ridottos, public
breakfasts, Castle balls, Circular Road canters, New Garden concerts,
and Blackrock casinos.’ ALSO, The Lie of the Day (1788), set
at Hampton Court, has chiefly Irish characters, Edward O’Donovan,
TCD sizar, and Larry Kavanagh, being changelings, the former being the
true sone of Sir Carroll O’Donovan. The term ‘bog-trotter’
is used [152]. Further, gives an account fo John O’Keeffe, The
World in a Village (1793), in which Capt. Mullinahack, serving with
the French navy, is captured and sheltered in England by the widowed mother
of a youth he has saved from drowning, and finds his own daughter playing
lady bountiful to the poor of the neighbourhood; the comedy develops from
the Moliere-theme of the mistaken examination, and from various bulls
and blunders. In an anonymous piece, The Raft (1798), with Charles
Johnstone as O’Bowling, an Irish navyman appears, ‘I’m
an Irishman born and as pretty a youth/As ever bawl’d whack or the
sweet Gramachree/In a drop of the creature I always find truth/And a drop
of the creature’s the true drop for me.’
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References
Dictionary of National Biography; 12 years an actor with
Mossop in Dublin; Tony Lumpkin in Town (Hay 1778); lived in England
from 1780, wrote comic pieces for Haymarket and Covent Garden theatres;
Wild Oats; The Castle of Andalusia, revived by Buckstone;
a successful song, ‘I am a Friar of the Orders Grey’ in op.
Merry Sherwood; Covent Garden benefit 1800, and royal pension,
1820; Recollections (1826).
Justin McCarthy, gen. ed., Irish Literature, ed. (Washington: University of America 1904); gives ‘a Budget of Stories’ from Recollections, selections incl. ‘No snakes in Ireland] [an Irish bull from a workman operating the mechanical snake in Woodward’s Crow St. Theatre who calls it a fish]; ‘Auld Ireland’ [a semi-idyll of his ‘time’, treating of roads, beggars, and singer cow-girls, ‘the great pride of a countryman on a Sunday, was to have three or four waistcoats on him’]; ‘Quarrelsome Irishmen’ [Brady; ‘You’re beneath me’; the actor Dawson, on a table, ‘Now I am above you!’; also a Cork narrative, ‘I’ll rattan you’]; ‘Thomas Sheridan’ [the plan for his spelling dictionary; five ways of rendering ‘None but the brave deserve the fair’; Captain O’Blunder taken from a French farce for Isaac Sparkes]; ‘On his Blindness’ [includes reference to ‘pistol work either on the strand at Clontarf or behind Montague House ... or any other battle field, west of Mother Red-cap’s’]; ‘Sir Joshua Reynolds’ [on blocking a timber yard with trees, ‘Now you cannot see the wood for the trees’]; also ‘The Friar of Orders Gray’, poem [2 stanzas, refrain, ‘What baron or squire/Or knight of the shire/Lives half so well as a holy friar!’].
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Geoffrey Taylor, Irish Poets of the Nineteenth Century; var. d.1833; Irish play-titles incl. The Shamrock, or The Anniversary of St. Patrick (Cvt Gdn 1783), Patrick in Prussia (Dublin 1786), The Poor Soldier, comic op. (Cvt. Gdn 1783), Wicklow Mountains or Gold in Ireland (q.d.), The Lad of the Hills (Lon 1796), Wicklow Gold Mines, or The Boy from the Scalp (1830), with Tyrone Power as Billy O’Rourke, in his 1st stage appearance [ditto GBI].
Peter Kavanagh, The Irish Theatre (Tralee 1946), pp.348-61; lists 77 works. b. Abbey St., of a Catholic family that lost property after the Boyne; ed. Father Austin, SJ; studied painting under West at RIA [recte RDS]; his sight began to fail at 27; total loss of sight ensued in 1781, with a fall in the Liffey on the way to Ringsend for post-play refreshment bringing on inflammation. The Agreeable Surprise was the last piece written by his own hand [the rest being dictated for, as he said, ‘a man can compose with his pen in the hand of an amanuensis but the pencil he must hold in his own hand’, Recollections, i.3]. At a benefit on June 12 1800, O’Keeffe, led out blind on stage, recited a poetical address, deeply affecting the audience. He received an annuity of 20 pounds for his unused MSS from Covent Garden, and in Jan. 1826 was awarded a pension of 100 pounds from the King causing him to end his Recollections with a note of gratitude - ‘may he live long and happy!’ Died at 85 in Southampton, a Roman Catholic; portrait by Thomas Laurenson in National Portrait Gallery, London.
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Patrick Rafroidi, Irish Literature in English, The Romantic Period, 1789-1850, (Gerrards Cross: Colin Smythe 1980), Vol. I; ‘John O’Keeffe, ‘France once tried the slap-dash, short-cut, of doing without rule or order, and what was the result?’ (Recollections, 1826, I, 4, 124); O’Keeffe also showed himself initially favourable [to the French Revolution] in The Grenadier (1789), and banned from the stage after part-publication, to appear in full in his complete works in 1798. [13]. FURTHER, A ballad, ‘Simon the Pauper’, by John O’Keeffe, shows Wordsworthian fashion (Dublin Magazine and Irish Monthly Register, III, Nov. 1799, p.310); ALSO, John O’Keeffe’s patriotism, ‘If ever again I set foot in Ireland, let who will see me, be they hundreds and thousands, I’ll kneel down and kiss the ground, the blessed ground.’ (Recorded by Adelaide O’Keeffe in O’Keeffe’s Legacy to his Daughter, p.XIX). The Poor Soldier (1782) includes a tender evocation of the beauties of Ireland (specifically Leixlip and Carton, 1.2). in Fontainebleau Mrs O’Cas[e]y recalls, ‘Kilkenny is a handsome place/As any town in Shamrock-shire.’(2.i.) The Prisoner at Large (1788) attacks absenteeism and The Wicklow Mountains (1795-96?) discreetly emphasises justification of Whiteboy and Steelboy risings, ‘See you not what heavy grievances we lay under, our great landlords spending money abroad, their stewards patch by patch enclosing our commons, and their parsons with their rich livings leaving us in the claws of their cursed griping tithe-practors.’ (2.ii.) The young landlord Franklin says at the end, ‘In this land of abundance, why shou’d our peasantry languish in such lamentable wretchedness? - we we to turn our attention a little more to this, instead of the unhappy necessity of punishing crimes, we might prevent their commission, by awakening them from the idlenesss of despondency, with our countenance and protection, and rewarding their labours by the genial and cherishing encouragement of kindness and humanity.’ (The Wicklow Mountains, conclusion.) ‘My Lamentation’, sung to the tune of ‘Erin Go Bra’, contains the line, ‘My infant joy, thou much-loved isle[?]/Ah no! they faithless sons have sold thee ..’ (O’Keeffe’s Legacy, pp.162 seq.) [99-101] SEE ALSO Rafroidi, op. cit., Vol 2 (1980), b. Abbey St., Dublin, his mother an O’Connor from Co. Wexford; ed. Jesuits, Dublin and Dublin School of Design; joined Mossop’s company; m. Mary Heaphy, dg. of Theatre Royal mgr., in 1774; separated in 1781; Hazlitt called him ‘The English Moliere’ (Lectures on English Comic Writers, VIII); Lady Morgan, ‘The Béranger of Ireland’ (in O’Keeffe’s Legacy). He was the most prolific author of musical comedies; a Jacobite in the pay of the House of Brunswick; a Catholic (with a son a Protestant minister), and a painter. His most popular work was The Poor Soldier (Covent Garden in 1783), new ed. (Dublin 1784) 34pp. Titles of Irish interest, ‘Patrick’s Day in the Morning’, poem, in Legacy, p.167; Harlequin Teague, or the Giant’s Causeway (text in Larpent; songs publ. London 1782); The Castle of Andulusia (text printed in Cork 1783); The Shamrock; or St. Patrick’s Day (Crow St., unpub., Larpent). Some works in Collection of Farces, 2 vols. (J. Smith, Dublin 1785); others printed piratically in Dublin, such as Wild Oats, or the Strolling Gentlemen, 5 act com. (Dublin 1791), a Covent Gdn. play of that year; Olympus in an Uproar, or the Descent of the Deities, (Covent Gnd. 1796, adapted from Kane O’Hara’s The Golden Pippin, Larpent ms).
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Joseph Leerssen, Mere Irish & Fíor Ghael, 1986, Captain Mullinaheck, in O’Keeffe’s The World in A Village (1793), ‘Madam, let me be blown into chops and griskins from the mouth of a cannon, when I turn my face as an enemy against George my belov’d King, and Ireland my honoured country!’[146]. His comic opera Fontainbleu (1790) features an Irish innkeeper in France who lures English tourists to her establishment (The British Lion), with English fare and English jingo-ism, ‘English! that’s what I am. I was born in Dublin.’ [Leerssen, p.149.] ALSO, O’Keeffe, The Prisoner at Large (Newmarket, 1778) set near Killarney lakes; here the tenants are being racked by the middleman Dowdle, acting for absentee Lord Esmond, then on the Grand Tour; the evil Count Fripon, a sharper, is trying to collect the rents; and when Esmond returns he manages with the help of honest Jack Connor to overthrow the schemes of middleman and parasite. [Joseph Leerssen, Mere Irish & Fíor Ghael, 1986, p.158]. And BIBL, Dramatic Works, 4 vols. (London 1798); Fountainbleu, &c. (Dublin 1790); The she-gallant, or, square-toes outwitted (London 1767); The world in a village (London n.d. [1790]).
Seamus Deane, gen. ed., Field Day Anthology of Irish Writing (Derry: Field Day 1991), Vol. 1 selects Tony Lumpkin in Town’, 647-50; and The Poor Soldier, 650-54; BIOG & COMM, 657; Vol. 2 selects The Agreeable Surprise ‘The Jingle’ [‘Amo, Amas’].
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Trinity College Libraries, Dublin hold The Castle of Andalusia, a comic opera in three acts (J. Sullivan 1783), 8p.; with cast list for Smock Alley performance.
Belfast Public Library holds O’Keeffe’s Legacy to his Daughter, being the Poetical Works of the late John O’Keeffe, 2 vols. (1834); Recollections (1826).
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Quotations
Oxford Dictionary of Quotations selects ‘Amo, Amas, I love
a lass/As a cedar tall and slender;/Sweet as cowslip’s grace/Is her
nominative case/And she’s of the feminine gender ..’ (Agreeable
Surprise, song); ‘Fat, fair and forty were all the toasts of
the young men’ (Irish Minnie, ii). Cf. Geoffrey Taylor (p.
395), O’Keeffe studied painting under West at the RDS. The Agreeable
Surprise (1781) includes the lines, ‘Amo, amas,/I love a lass.’
ALSO, from Wild Oats, Rover’s epilogue, ‘To merit as
friend so good so sweet a wife/The tender husband to be my part for life/My
wild oats sown, let candid Thespian laws/Decree that glorious harvest
your applause’.
'My drawig gave me an early taste for the antique, and consequently set me to reading. From the Greek, latin, and French acquired under Father austin, to whose school in Cook Street I went, my fancy soon strayed to Shakespeare, old Ben, Congreve, Cibber and Farquhar. The first edition of Farquhar’s comedies, with the printes affixed to each of them, set me to studying and acting private plays among my schoolfellows; and this transition from drawing to poetising was ultimately (as my sight began to fail at seven and twenty) very fortunate for me; a man can complse with his pen in the hand of an amanuensis, but the pencil he must hold in his own hand.’ (Recollections, Vol. 1, p.2; cited in
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Notes
Born in Dublin into a Catholic family that had suffered under the penal
laws; ed. first by a Jesuit, later studied art; became actor on the Dublin
stage and from early age began writing for the theatre; moved to London
about 1780; financially embarrassed in 1800; received pension of 100 guineas
a year, 1820; Recollections (1826); more than three dozen separate
works, comedies, farces, adaptations, comic operas and other light-hearted
stage entertainments; also verses in newspapers, &c.; pieces were
nearly always popular, appearing variously at the Haymarket, Drury Lane
and Covent Garden theatres, in Dublin, and elsewhere; called ‘the
English Moliere’ by Hazlitt; Irish delineations, superficial and
less so, include pantomime Harlequin Teague (Haymarket, 17 August,
1782), featuring the Giant’s Causeway; The Toy, also named
Lie of the Day (Covent Garden, 3 February, 1789), with Carrol O’Donovan
and Young O’Donovan, the latter a needy Irishman in England; The
Poor Soldier (Covent Garden, 7 April, 1783), and its sequel Patrick
in Prussia (Covent Garden, 17 February, 1786), the first set in Ireland
and including Patrick, Nora, Kathleen, Father Luke and similar characters;
The Prisoner at Large (Haymarket, 2 July, 1788) set in the west
of Ireland; The Lad of the Hills (Covent Garden, 9 April, 1796),
an opera set in Wicklow; The She Gallant (Haymarket, 13 October,
1789), featuring the Irish servant Thady MacBrogue; and Tantara-rara
Rogues All! (Covent Garden, l March, 1788), a farce set in Paris but
including in its cast Sir Ulick Liffydale and O’Toole, alias Lord
Limavaddy [JMcV]. Bibl. adds Harlequin Teague (Haymarket, 17 August,
1782), which features the Giant’s Causeway; The Toy, or
Lie of the Day (Covent Garden, 3 February, 1789), in which figure
Sir Carrol O’Donovan and Young O’Donovan, the latter a needy
Irishman in England; The Poor Soldier (Covent Garden, 7 April,
1783), and its sequel Patrick in Prussia (Covent Garden, 17 February,
1786), the first set in Ireland and including Patrick, Nora, Kathleen,
Father Luke and similar characters; The Prisoner at Large (Haymarket,
2 July, 1788) set in the west of Ireland; The Lad of the Hills (Covent
Garden, 9 April, 1796), an opera set in Wicklow; The She-Gallant (Haymarket,
13 October, 1789), featuring the Irish servant Thady MacBrogue; and Tantara-rara
Rogues All! (Covent Garden, l March, 1788), a farce set in Paris but
including in its cast Sir Ulick Liffydale and O’Toole, alias Lord
Limavaddy.
Erroneous entry in Holloway’s dramatic bibliography in Guide to Books on Ireland, ed. Stephen Brown, under John [?]O’Kelly, The Shamrock or the Anniversary of St. Patrick (Cvt. Gdn. 1783), title[s] changed to The Poor Soldier; Wicklow Mountains or Gold in Ireland, The Lad of the Hills, Love in the Camp (Patrick in Prussia) [GBI] But Note that Patrick O’Kelly follow O’Keeffe in JMC (Irish Lit., 1904).
John O’Keeffe’s Recollections of the Dublin stage, often quoted, viz Fitzpatrick’s Dublin, Gilbert’s History of Dublin, and also in Dictionary of National Biography entries on Irish dramatists and actors.
Irish classical plays, as listed by W. B. Stanford, Ireland and the Classical Tradition (IAP 1976; 1984), include J O’Keeffe, The Siege of Troy (1795) [110]. FURTHER, John O’Keeffe, the chief comic figure in The Agreeable Surprise (1792) is an Irish butler called Lingo, described as an incorrigible pedant-ignoramus, ‘It seems he’s been a schoolmaster here in the country, taught all the bumkin fry what he calls Latin; and the damn’d dog patches his own bad English with his bits of bad Latin and jumbles the Gods, Godesses, heroes celestial and infernal together ..’; ‘Scio scribendo ... Legere ... Tacitorum Latinum ... Quid opus mihi usumque scienta? What need have I of so much knowledge?’ [176]
Thomas Moore acknowledged indebtedness to O’Keeffe’s Irish songs in the first vol. of his Poetical Works, which relate that he acted in amateur performances of The Poor Soldier and Harlequin Pantomime and also wrote and recited ‘an appropriate epilogue for the occasion’ (Poetical Works, p.16; cited in Robert Ward, Encyc. of Irish Schools, 1500-1800, 1995, p.154.)
Wild Oats, dir. Jeremy Sams (Lyttleton Th., London); first performed 1791; farce with remarkable ability to accomodate itself elsewhere in history; Dickens has Vincent Crummles include it in Nicholas Nickleby’s repertoire [1831]; revived by RSC, with Alan Howard as Rover, 1976; relentless pace of what Hazlett called admiringly the ‘most felicitous blunders in situation and character that can be conceived’; Hazlett reproached for calling O’Keeffe the English Molière, since he was Catholic-born in Dublin; play ends with invocation of O’Keeffe’s favourite comedy, As You Like It; Rover, a ‘stray-vaguing stroller’; successive Kean-like postures and quotes from nathaniel Lee or Farquhar; in final self-disgust Rover compelled to pronounce himself ‘from Wirtembrug’ to the woman he loves; Sir George Thunder finally asks the only important question [of Rover], ‘But who is he?’; obvious appeal of wild oats in age of low sperm count; rapidly written to replace a dramatisation of the fall of the Batille, cancelled due to sudden crescendo of anti-French feeling; deliberately turns on its head the commonest anti-jacobin story of all, that of a modern-minded stranger arriving in a small country community and subverting at least one rishing member of the gentry from ancient ways; Jack Rover takes anyone, regardless of rank, to the bosom of his latest imaginary family; what is this if not the creation of a chaotic democracy? To be sure Lady Amaranth gives up her title only because she has become a Quaker, but [Sir George Thunder’s] apoplexy on being called ‘good George’ by her servants – "they think no more of an English knight than a French Duke" – provides a pleasure certainly comparable to the humbling of Lady Catherine de Bourgh [in Jane Austen]; [Anthony] Lesser’s Rover’s governs the play’s mood swings; lurhces toward tragedy; when Sir George, who expects everybody to "know" him, finds his own son leading a plot to have him declared an imposter, he strikes out at all and sundry, bloodying our hero in the process; blood signals the end of artifice, the mask drops, and [Rover] faces us, swearing vengeance; criss son passes; historionic seduction we are as powerless as Amaranth to resist; feel of a street carnival; Rover quotes As You Like It, ‘’this meat and drink for me to see a clown"; his predilectin for currant wine; "the fullness of plenty". (Review by rosemary Bechler, TLS, 22 Sept. 1995, p.20.)
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Princess Grace Irish Library (Monaco)