Summer 2015

Victorian Farces

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The motto for the AnglistenTheater's 2015 summer production was "And now for something completely different" -- no contemporary play this time, but two mid 19th century farces: John Maddison Morton, Box and Cox, and Joseph Stirling Coyne, How to Settle Accounts with Your Laundress.

John Maddison Morton (1811 – 1891) was an English playwright who specialised in one-act farces. His most famous farce was Box and Cox (1847): Mrs Bouncer, a London lodging-house keeper, is letting an apartment to a double tenantry – to Box, a printer on a daily newspaper, and to Cox, a journeyman hatter, the former occupying the room during the day, the latter during the night. They invariably meet on the stairs of the lodging-house when one comes in from work as the other is going out, but neither has any idea that Mrs Bouncer is letting his room to the other ...

Joseph Stirling Coyne (1803–1868) was one of the most prolific British playwrights of the mid-nineteenth century; he wrote more than sixty plays. In the romantic farce How to Settle Accounts with Your Laundress (1847), Wittington Widgett, a tailor, is engaged to Mary the Laundress, but her ‘hymeneal’ determination unnerves him. After much farcical distraction Widgett falls into the arms of his fiancée.

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• Take a look at our programme for Victorian Farces.
• Read our press release (in German) for Victorian Farces.
• Listen to Bettina Auerswald’s sound tracks Love, Letter, Ghost and Outro created for the AnglistenTheater’s production of Victorian Farces.
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• Wikipedia: John Madison Morton; Joseph Stirling Coyne
• Conveniently, both the text of Morton’s Box and Cox and of Coyne’s How to Settle Accounts with Your Laundress are freely avaiable on the internet.