Trelawny of the 'Wells'

"Trelawny of the 'Wells"' is an 1898 comic play by Arthur Wing Pinero. It tells the story of a theatre star who attempts to give up the stage for love, but is unable to fit into conventional society.

ynopsis

"Trelawny of the 'Wells"' tells the story of Rose Trelawny, a popular star of melodrama plays at the Barridge Wells Theatre (a thinly disguised Sadler's Wells Theatre). Rose gives up the stage when she marries her sweetheart, Arthur Gower, in order to please his conservative family. She finds life with Arthur's parents, Sir William and Lady Traflagar, unbearably dull and they detest her loud and unrestrained personality. Rose runs back to the theatre, abandoning Arthur. But her experience of the 'real world' has killed her talent for melodrama, and she cannot recapture the liveliness that had made her a star. Meanwhile, Arthur has secretly run away to become an actor at the Bristol Old Vic.

The problem is solved when Rose encounters Sir William again, and she reawakens his memory of admiring the great actor Edmund Kean as a young man. Sir William offers to help Rose's friend Tom Wrench, an aspiring playwright who dreams of staging plays in a more realist style than the melodramas that dominate the stage. Tom stages the play with Rose as the star, and her newfound seriousness fits his style perfectly. Tom secretly arranges for Arthur to play the leading male role, and the lovers are reunited on stage.

ubject matter

The play is about the theatre of the 1860s and Pinero insisted that the costume and production design perfectly recapture the fashions of the period. It depicts the melodrama that was popular at the time, but Tom Wrench's play is a reference to the new, more realist cup and saucer comedies that were beginning to be staged at the Prince of Wales's Theatre (Bratton, xix).

Performances

The play was first staged at the Royal Court Theatre in London on 20 January, 1898. It received lukewarm reviews. Pinero revised it heavily for performance at the Old Vic in 1925 (Bratton, xxiii).

References

*Jacky Bratton, ed. "Trelawny of the 'Wells' and Other Plays" (Oxford, 1995)