The 22-strong cast surges on stage to a peal of bells. They mime along to the prologue, playing words off actions as they describe the comedy we are about to see and cheerily give away its secrets – or do they? There is more to the action of The Shoemaker’s Holiday than the plot alone suggests. Thomas Dekker slyly exploits dramatic possibilities to communicate through structure and silence as well as through dialogue. Director Phillip Breen conveys multiple meanings in a period staging that never feels dated. In their ruffs and cloaks and calf-flattering stockings (men as well as women), crisply delineated characters come across as buoyantly Tudor; in their hopes, fears and teasing interactions, though, they are as contemporary as you or me.
Dekker’s 1599 play, set in London during England’s conflict with France a century earlier, presents a crafty critique of the world he lives in. Unlike his contemporary, William Shakespeare, Dekker sets his events mainly among the artisan classes; the importance of money is never forgotten. Most of the action is located in and around a shoemaker’s shop run by Simon Eyre – more force of nature than man, with an exuberant appetite for life and spirit of unbounded generosity (David Troughton is superhuman in this Falstaffian role). Here, a young aristocrat, Lacy, works in disguise as a Dutch cordwainer (Josh O’Connor combines hilarious vowels with a touching characterisation), having dodged the draft so as to be near the girl he loves, in spite of the objections of their elders. Thanks to a loan from Lacy, Eyre grows prosperous (much to the delight of his scolding, loving, apparel-obsessed wife).
At the beginning of the play, before he dons his disguise, Lacy refuses to excuse from military service a young, newly wed shoemaker, Ralph (sensitively conveyed by Daniel Boyd); it is Ralph’s place in the shop that Lacy unwittingly takes. A subplot of the play follows the (mis)fortunes of Ralph’s wife, assailed by an aristocrat who convinces her that her husband is dead (a finely nuanced performance from Hedydd Dylan). Ralph is, however, alive, and returns to the shoe shop, lame and disfigured; he does not recognise the disguised Lacy, who simply stands and stares. In Lacy’s look (as embodied by O’Connor) two main thoughts seem to jostle: “That could have been me” and/or “I made him go.”
The scene moves on, but its shadow remains. In that silent non-interaction, writer, director and performers offer the audience a powerful vision of the unfairness of the social structure and the wastefulness of war, while not allowing us to slip into comfortable, side-taking attitudes.
We cannot condemn Lacy, however much we sympathise with Ralph, partly because we cannot want him – or anyone – to suffer as Ralph and his loved ones have, but also because the prologue has promised a happy ending. This is delivered, thanks to holiday-giving Simon Eyre, shoemaker turned mayor of London. But the shadows darken in the final lines before the closing song as the visiting king announces: “When all our sports and banqueting are done,/ Wars must right wrongs that Frenchmen have begun.” More than 400 years old, this still feels like a tremendously contemporary play; if only its take on war and power were a little less relevant today.
