Diverting the course of comedy

George Farquhar was not only the first major Irish dramatist but he also shaped 18th-century English culture, writes Fintan O'Toole

Bertolt Brecht, who revolutionised 20th-century theatre, was sufficiently taken with two Irish playwrights to adapt their work to his own ends. One was John Millington Synge, whose Riders to the Sea he transformed into a political drama set during the Spanish Civil War. The other was George Farquhar, whose comedy, The Recruiting Officer, he turned, under the title Trumpets and Drums, into an anti-war play set during the American War of Independence.

Brecht was not alone in finding stimulation in Farquhar's play. It lies behind John Arden's Sergeant Musgrave's Dance, one of the seminal works of the new English theatre of the 1960s, and Timberlake Wertenbaker's Our Country's Good, which is a set text for A-level students in England. Though he seldom features among the superstars of Irish drama, Farquhar is, if not the greatest of Irish playwrights, then certainly the most influential.

Though he was just 30 when he died, he managed not only to become the first major Irish dramatist but to shape 18th-century English culture. Not just the plays of Oliver Goldsmith and Richard Brinsley Sheridan but the picaresque novels of Daniel Defoe, Henry Fielding and Tobias Smollett bear his mark. The Recruiting Officer is also the first play known to have been produced in North America, being performed at the New Theatre in New York in 1732.

For a man who had such an impact, Farquhar is a remarkably obscure figure, and there is no satisfactory biography of him. We do know that he was born in Derry in 1678, the son of an impoverished Church of Ireland clergyman. He studied at Trinity College Dublin, which he entered as a sizar (a poor scholar obliged to do menial jobs), but left without a degree. Some accounts suggest he was expelled for making a blasphemous joke about Christ walking on the water: "A man born to be hanged will never be drowned."

He took up acting at Smock Alley theatre. There, he linked up with Robert Wilks, who would become one of the leading figures of the London stage. Having accidentally stabbed a fellow actor during a fight scene in a play, Farquhar left for London with Wilks and had his semi- autobiographical play, Love and a Bottle, staged when he was just 20. A year later, in 1699, his second play, The Constant Couple, with Wilks in the central role of Sir Harry Wildair, was a huge hit, running for 53 nights in its first season and becoming a standard of the 18th-century English repertoire.

FARQUHAR'S SUCCESS WAS temporary, however, and he presumably spent whatever he earned. He married a widow with three daughters in 1703 and the following year he accepted a commission as a lieutenant from Lord Orrery. He went to Shrewsbury as a recruiting officer, giving him the material for the play that was first staged two years later. He then recruited in Kildare and Dublin, where he played Sir Harry Wildair for a benefit performance at Smock Alley. He also served in Holland for a time, though his military exploits were never mentioned in dispatches. He sold his commission, and was living in poverty when Wilks lent him money to allow him to write again. He was taken ill, probably with TB, and wrote the brilliant The Beaux Stratagem knowing that he was dying. He still managed to give it a brisk, playful humour that makes it one of the very few comedies of its time that are still funny.

Something of Farquhar's personality comes across in the letters to an anonymous lover that he published along with his poems. They have a puckish energy, combining bawdiness with wit: "I have had your Letter, Madam, and all that I understand by it is, that your Hand is as great a Riddle, as your Face ; and 'tis as difficult to find out your Sense in your Characters, as to know your Beauty in your Mask: but I have at last conquer'd the Maidenhead of your Writing, as I hope one Day I will that of your Person."

He writes from Essex that he has not changed his shirt "since I came into the Country; for clean Linen is not so modish here as a Lover might require". He reports an approach from an angry lady who accused him of having sold his soul to the devil for the success of The Constant Couple, "but her Ladyship is thus angry, because I would not pawn my Body to the Devil for another Sort of Play, of which I presume the Lady to be a very competent Judge".

THIS KIND OF playful, seductive banter is typical of Farquhar's own stage dialogue, but he draws a rather more sombre, if no less witty, portrait of himself in another letter to his lover. His mind, he says, is "generally dressed like my Person in black. Melancholy is its everyday Apparel; and it has hitherto found few Holidays to make it change its Clothes. In short, my Constitution is very Splenetic, and yet very amorous; both which I endeavour to hide, lest the former should offend others, and that the latter might incommode myself. And my Reason is so vigilant in restraining these two Failings that I am taken for an easy-natured Man with my own Sex, and an ill-natured Clown by yours."

These complex qualities of anger and amorousness, of a melancholy disposition and a vigilant reason, are what give Farquhar's plays their special nature. Though often listed as a Restoration dramatist, he in fact broke with the polished, brittle wit, and tight neo-classical forms of William Congreve and William Wycherley. The sexuality in Farquhar's plays is bawdy rather than cruel, warmer and more intimate than the hard-nosed erotic stratagems of the Restoration dramatists. His social canvas is broader, taking in provincial England as well as the enclosed world of London and the court. His dialogue is less finely wrought and (relatively speaking) more natural.

Above all, Farquhar addressed himself consciously to the lower and middle-class audiences of the great London theatres, rather than to high society. And in order to do so, he returned to the rough, mixed forms of Shakespeare, rejecting in the process the demand for French-style neo-classicism.

In his Discourse on Comedy, Farquhar, young punk that he was, put himself forward as what we would call a modernist, embracing the present and ostentatiously rejecting the wisdom of the past: "the World was never more alive or youthful, and true downright Sense was never more universal than at this very Day."

As a Protestant Irishman, he embraced the emerging idea of Britain as a multi- national State: "As we are a Mixture of many Nations, so we have the most unaccountable Medley of Humours among us of any People upon Earth; these Humours produce Variety of Follies, some of 'em unknown to former Ages."

It followed therefore that the plays of this culture should not be tight constructs written according to timeless rules but looser responses to the variety of urban life which could appeal in different ways to different people: "the Beau Courtier, the heavy Citizen, the fine Lady, and her fine Footman, come all to be instructed, and therefore must all be diverted; and he that can do this best, and with most Applause, writes the best Comedy, let him do it by what Rules he pleases, so they be not offensive to Religion and good Manners."

This last phrase was a concession to the attacks on the immorality of the Restoration stage that were then current in English culture, and in some ways Farquhar prepared the ground for the sentimental, moralising comedy that dominated the rest of the 18th-century theatre. But his own work is perfectly poised between the hardness of Wycherley and Congreve and the softness of what would follow him. It is, in Farquhar's terms, both splenetic and amorous, suffused with a warm sexual energy but bolstered by an underlying strain of very dark humour. Love and a Bottle opens with Roebuck, who is about to enlist in the army, meeting a disabled soldier begging on the street. In the second act of The Twin Rivals, there is a strange farce centring on a corpse.

FOR ALL ITS good humour, The Recruiting Officer is not shy about the exploitative nature of recruiting, the harshness of military discipline or the corruption and cynicism of a war machine. Though written in the immediate afterglow of the Battle of Blenheim, England's most resonant land victory since the Battle of Agincourt, it contains, within its shell of laughter and amiability, a tough satire on military life.

It says much for Farquhar's talent that his own play has worn better than Brecht's updated version. Like the Irish playwrights who followed him, he knew that comedy and seriousness were not opposing qualities. He wrote of himself that he preferred serious jokes to trivial ones: "I hate all little malicious Tricks of vexing People for Trifles, or teasing them with frightful Stories . . . In short, if ever I do a wilful Injury, it must be a very great one."

He did serious injury to the pomposities of war, and 300 years after his death, the joke is still sadly funny.

The Recruiting Officer, by George Farquhar, directed by Lynne Parker, opens at the Abbey Theatre on Thur