Lettice & Lovage ephemera
Lettice & Lovage by Peter Shaffer
These "descriptions" tell what I thought about the characters before casting and rehearsals. It's inevitable that many points got changed, some even contradicted, as soon as the cast began work to create their characters.
Lettice Douffet (pronounced doo-FAY): In her forties or fifties. She has a mission. May find it hard to stay focused on the present; the past (and her past) is more vivid to her. She is not absent, exactly, but has an ambiguous relationship to what we think are her real surroundings. There is a chance she hears music a lot of the time. Doesn't like what is gray, indefinite and insipid. Her late mother, the redoubtable Alice Evans Douffet, still influences her thinking and especially her responses to the world. Her apartment is a retreat, and her chosen companion is Felina, Queen of Sorrows, a put-upon cat.
Charlotte (Lotte) Schoen (no one in the cast ever believed me when I said her name should be pronounced Shane): About the same age as Lettice. She lives uprightly, more than a little ashamed of the terrorist passage in her youth—an abandoned mission? She focuses hard all the time and has an opinion on everything. The influence she can't shake is her father, a publisher of art books who preached to her about the death of European culture. Her haunting image is of wrecking balls, operated by the English, tearing down subtle, balanced old England to make room for schlocky new International-style buildings.
Surly Man: A loudmouth and know-it-all. Spiritual cousin to Lotte, or he would be if she had no saving grace.
Miss Framer: She has never made a good impression on a boss, and though quite young she has had a bunch of them. She takes literally what Lotte tells her, but still gets lost in a story of Lettice's.
Mr. Bardolph: An attorney (solicitor), professionally deadpan, old enough to be thoroughly trained but not yet beyond getting the occasional court commission to represent an indigent. He dresses in the approved manner (black suit, black shoes, black briefcase) but has enough muddy little boy inside to make a pretty fair drummer.
I described this comedy—by the author of Amadeus, Equus and The Royal Hunt of the Sun—as "tough-minded." Lettice may strike you at first as a little weak-minded, in fact, and Lotte as the model of a person who clings to rules to disguise a lack of mental fiber.
Look, though, at where they end up. Lettice has deliberately talked herself out of two jobs (she's probably in her last days as cruise commentator too). Lotte is about to quit the bureaucracy and become a small entrepreneur—something I can tell you from personal experience simply won't do for a person without psychic resources.
And consider where they came from. Lotte studied architecture and took its environmental lessons so to heart that she nearly blew up a major multinational energy company. Lettice toured France with what must have been a perennially failing theater company, but from her mother she learned how vital stories are in the mind's environment. Lotte has acted out a life of stability and moderation, while Lettice has lived a series of overwrought scenes.
Finally, think about the changes they go through in getting from point A to point B. They collide (Act 1 Scene 1). They find a germ (only a germ!) of mutual respect (1/2). In telling each other their histories, they find uniquely sympathetic audiences (Act 2) and, as you or I would, play more and more warmly to those audiences. In Act 3 we find rule-lover Lotte tearing down the prosecution case against Lettice while story-lover Lettice soberly confronts Mr. Bardolph's facts.
Tough-minded is right. Our audience got a hell of a ride.
| Back to ephemera | Production index page |
| Approved Ben Teague web site |
 |
Production pages