The Double Beaux, 1988

Of all my plays, this little pastiche is the one which has received the most productions – three different versions so far – which is surprising given the technical demands it makes of both set designer and actors.

It grew out of the little parody I had tossed together for the company to read at the cast party after a run of Vanbrugh’s The Provok’d Wife  at the Little Theatre in Bristol. I’ve always enjoyed writing pastiche, and since the party piece seemed to go down well, I thought I’d try and work it up into something more substantial. The doubling of the leads might be gimmicky, but I felt the challenge would increase the pleasure for both the audience and the performers, and the Cabinet – which, I think, is a rather brilliant stroke of genius, frankly – was as much a way of paring down the set as it was an operational necessity.

I first entered it in an amateur competition in Bridgwater where it was chosen as one of the three winning entries to be given a full performance. Beau Jest, or Virtue in Abundance as it was then called received its inaugural production by the very brave One-Off Productions company, directed by Philip de Glanville. The adjudicators gave the script short shrift, considering it a pale rip-off of Shakespeare’s “least inspiring” comedy The Comedy of Errors. My immediate thought was that this was an unfair comparison – just because Shakespeare failed to make a success of his idea involving two sets of identical twins didn’t mean I couldn’t… But protesting would have been churlish. Reference was also made to Blackadder which I suppose was inevitable (it was set in the past and had a lot of rude wordplay), but I’m glad to say it won the award for the Best Play in Performance, which I thought was only fair, given how hard the cast had to work in comparison to the other finalists, which favoured conventional sets and lots of middle-class types standing around languishing in anguish. We’ve all been there, love. At least mine gave people a few laffs while they were out, and I hope one day it will get the chance to do so again.

A word on the characters’ names. They are obviously firmly within the tradition of nominative determinism that was such a feature of Restoration comedy, and most are derived from the original Vanbrugh play – his Sir John Brute becomes my Sir John Bastard; his Lady Fancyfull becomes my Lady Bellyfull; Constant, the dithering lover, becomes my Ernest, and so on. Admittedly I upped the ante turning Vanbrugh’s Heartfree into my Cocksure Bastard, but few have ever had to reproach me for my tasteful restraint.

Interestingly (for me anyway), it never occurred to me to apply the same kind of satirical gloss to the young women’s roles when I was first writing the thing, which strikes me now as an absurd and unnecessary piece of discrimination. What, was I trying not to offend the fairer sex or something, unwilling to suggest they couldn’t take a bit of edgy bantz on occasion? What a simp. Anyway, for a long time they were simply called Belinda (the feisty one, taken directly from the Vanbrugh), and Susanna, which came from I know not whence. Was I dimly recalling a Susanna from some other Restoration piece? I don’t know. But once I resolved to remedy the matter and give the girls their own obvious monikers, I settled very swiftly on Virginia for the – well, the virginal one, but then found that the more spirited of the two was going to pose a problem. How to convey her innocent feminine side while at the same time hinting at the dark flames of passion seething underneath? It was easy enough back in the day – in Up Pompeii (1971), for instance, Frankie Howard’s girlfriend, the glorious Adrienne Posta, is simply called Scrubba, take it or leave it, but these days we need to be a bit more subtle don’t we?

Akimbo caught my fancy for a while (as in ‘legs akimbo’), but it sounded rather ungainly and anyway a feminine name ought to end in A and Akimba not only doesn’t mean anything but it sounds African. Nymphia (as in ‘nymphomaniac’) sounds like a pond weed. For a while I cycled through the obvious easy laughs – Spredda, Byka, Slutta, Shagga – but they don’t work because they don’t sound like anything real (unlike, ahem, Cocksure Bastard), but it was necessary to get them out of my system. And, to be fair to the character, there is no evidence that she is any more experienced than her prim twin, her joy in sex may still be, as far as we know, aspirational.

For a while I liked Caldera for its association with heat and a big hole, but would people make that connection? And isn’t it a bit crude anyway? (Well, it is when you put it like that…) So that was no good. Then there were the failed perfume names like Disasta and Fiasco, but the first doesn’t work and the second ends, again, in O, so they were out. One could perhaps go the classical route with Philia (‘one who loves’) but maybe that was too allusive and not really strong enough within the tenor of the text. For a while I toyed with Pantia, for its association with both the garment and the heavy breathing, and it also echoed the dual nature of so much else in the play, as does Brassa, recalling both a bra and ‘bold as brass’, but again, neither sounds like anything real so I discarded them.

I was on the verge of giving up and settling for Viagra (‘that which sets a man on’), when at the last moment, as is so often the way, the simplest and best solution suddenly plopped into my lap like Cinderella’s slipper – Lucie. Completely ordinary, classic, feminine name, even recalling the youngest of the Pevensie children in The Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe – except it’s also got the word ‘loose’ stuck right there in the middle of it. Perfect. And it had only taken me thirty years to think of it…

As Blade with Ann R