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She Stoops To Conquer She Stoops To Conquer. By Oliver Goldsmith. Downstage Theatre, Wellington, New Zealand. 29 July 1995.
"What's that goes round the house, and round the house, and never touches the house?" asks Tony Lumpkin. The answer might well be She Stoops to Conquer-at least in this self-consciously theatrical New Zealand production. Colin McColl's cheerful Edwardian romp accepts that the plot is thin-essentially a series of repeats on a single joke-but rightly assumes that we are willing to be entertained through a good many circuits of the course.
To emphasize this recurrent pattern and its self-referential sense of performance, the designer Tony Rabbit has boldly reconfigured the audience arrangement around his circular set. Theatre in the round is neither new nor difficult in Wellington's flexible Hannah Playhouse, but Rabbit has eliminated the building's angles and removed the solid barrier from the front of the gallery. Like the packed mass of humanity in Rowlandson's satirical engravings of late-eighteenth-century Georgian playhouses, the audience now seems to be perched much closer over the actors. And the sense of participation is intensified.
The small circle of playing space resembles a tiny circus, or a training ring for horses, complete with sawdust. Above it is a circular carousel canopy, decorated like a Victorian...