The Shoemaker’s Holiday

The Swan Theatre
Stratford-Upon-Avon

4/5

THE RSC opened its Swan Theatre autumn season with The Roaring Girl by the two Thomases, Dekker and Middleton. They close it with another Dekker play which could have been entitled The Roaring Boys.

Dekker, once seen as the most jobbing playwright among Shakespeare’s contemporaries — turning his considerable talents to virtually all the dramatic genres of the time — cobbled together a riotous portrayal of London working-class life with the focus on the “gentle” trade of shoemaking in this early citizen comedy. 

Supposedly set in the middle ages, but clearly a mirror to Dekker’s own times, the play’s romantic thread allows him to explore the tensions between class differences and true love.

If what can be seen as largely a jolly romp provides a sly commentary on the class structure, the centre of interest lies with the world of the shoemakers’ guild. 

The character of the master shoemaker Simon Eyre, based on an actual figure who rose to become lord mayor of London in the 15th century, is Falstaffian in his ebullient energy. 

Here he’s explosively embodied in David Troughton, who envelops his workers and his wife in a tirade of hyperbolically inventive language which the audience do not need to understand to revel in.

The play is rich in character roles. Vivien Parry as Eyre’s social-climbing wife — demanding a farthingale “to enlarge my bum” — Josh O’Connor as the lovelorn aristo disguised as a cod Dutch shoemaker and Joel McCormack as Eyre’s wickedly puckish journeyman lead a triumphant cast.

Yet director Phillip Breen doesn’t allow the theatrical gaiety to mask the darker realities of Dekker’s world. 

As the play climaxes in general festivities, stage-managed by newly appointed lord mayor Eyre and an unbelievably benevolent king, the latter reminds the rejoicing apprentices that there is a war to be fought and the action menacingly freezes as the press gangs move in.

Runs until March 7, box office:
rsc.org.uk