There are myriad plays about marriage. Far fewer about the wedding ceremony itself. But this month London theatregoers are invited to attend a couple of them. In the case of Sam Holcroft’s A Mirror, transferring from the Almeida to the Trafalgar theatre, we are quite literally among the guests. Beth Steel’s Till the Stars Come Down, at the Dorfman, makes us witnesses of working-class Sylvia’s wedding to her Polish groom: an event that reveals the rancour lurking beneath the surface of a boisterous family get-together. When one of the characters says “It wouldn’t be much of a wedding without a punch-up” it set me thinking how rarely, in the theatre, people get happily spliced. I have come up with five plays that suggest that the wedding day itself is something to be endured rather than enjoyed.
I am astonished that Arnold Wesker’s The Wedding Feast is virtually unknown. It premiered in Sweden in 1974, had British productions in Leeds and Birmingham in 1977 and 1980 – the latter with David Suchet – and has since disappeared. Based on a Dostoevsky short story, it is one of Wesker’s finest works and, not unlike Steel’s play, raises big issues about class and race. It’s the story of a rich Jewish shoe manufacturer who drops in uninvited on the wedding of one of his workers: a decision that leads to social embarrassment and personal humiliation. No one gains from the experience. The boss sees the limits of his capitalist paternalism, the wedding guests reveal their boozy boorishness and the married couple confront a joyless future.
If Wesker’s play raises social and political issues, Lorca’s Blood Wedding (1933) reminds us of the power of ancestral hatreds. This brooding, brilliant piece of poetic realism shows a bride being abducted, at the height of the marriage ceremony, by a former lover with whom the groom’s family have a bitter feud. Part of what makes the play so gripping is Lorca’s ability to contrast the celebratory wedding-feast songs and dances with the emotional chill of the bridal couple. Reviewing Rufus Norris’s inventive Almeida production in 2005, I found myself wondering whether the play defied translation. One answer same in 2019 when the Young Vic staged a version by Marina Carr that successfully transposed the action to Ireland.
But, whatever Lorca and Wesker suggest, it is possible to write a genuinely funny, farcical play about a wedding that leaves us all laughing. Perhaps surprisingly, the dramatist who did it was Bertolt Brecht in A Respectable Wedding (1926) which was revived by Joe Hill-Gibbins at the Young Vic in 2007 in a translation by Rory Bremner with James Corden as the best friend who enlivens the ceremony by reading out smutty poems. Brecht’s target was bourgeois propriety but his method owed more to Groucho than to Karl Marx. The bride is three months pregnant, the guests behave outrageously and the groom’s do-it-yourself furniture-making reaches a hilarious climax when the marriage bed noisily collapses.
Comedy of a more sophisticated kind appears in Ben Jonson’s Epicœne or The Silent Woman (1609). Apart from a Danny Boyle revival with David Bradley at the Swan in Stratford upon Avon in 1989, the play has been little done. Morose, the misanthropic hero, so detests the meaningless clatter of social life that he seeks a silent bride. One is eventually found but Morose is tormented first by a raucous wedding feast and then by the discovery – spoiler alert – that his bride is a boy in disguise.
If you want a really good example of a wedding that goes wrong, however, you have only to turn to Shakespeare and Much Ado About Nothing (1598). Mistakenly believing Hero to have engaged in pre-marital sex, Claudio famously spurns her at the altar saying: “Give not this rotten orange to your friend.” What I find extraordinary is the intemperate reaction of her father, Leonato, who says that, if he didn’t think Hero would quickly die, “myself would … strike at thy life”. The situation may eventually be resolved but in the words of Benedick: “This looks not like a nuptial.”
But few theatrical weddings go as planned, whether it be Peer Gynt running off with the bride or Petruchio turning up rudely apparelled and with a horse “possessed in the glanders and like to mose in the chine”: in other words, badly diseased. A day of celebration is invariably touched with disaster. It is not, I suggest, because most dramatists are downright cynics but because they are supreme ironists who see that the social rituals we create disguise the ugly realities beneath. Even if your marriage is made in heaven the wedding day itself is often hell.
A Mirror is at the Trafalgar theatre, London, 22 January–20 April. Till the Stars Come Down is at the National Theatre, London, 24 January–16 March.
