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How to Settle Accounts with your Laundress: An Original Farce, in One Act cover

How to Settle Accounts with your Laundress: An Original Farce, in One Act

Chapter 2: COSTUME.
By J. Stirling Coyne
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About This Book

Set in a fashionable tailor’s show-room, this one-act farce follows a vain tailor who prepares a private supper for an opera dancer while managing a bumbling page and arranging clothes and provisions. Domestic and professional spheres collide when the laundress arrives to collect garments and routine errands trigger a cascade of interruptions, misunderstandings, and rapid entrances and exits. The action depends on visual costume changes, precise stage business, and situational comedy to produce farcical confusion while gently exposing social pretensions and class contrasts in a compact, briskly paced structure.

HOW TO SETTLE ACCOUNTS WITH YOUR LAUNDRESS.

AN ORIGINAL FARCE, IN ONE ACT.

BY J. STIRLING COYNE.

First performed at the Theatre Royal, Adelphi, Monday, July 26, 1847.

Dramatis Personæ

WHITTINGTON WIDGETTS (A West-end Tailor) Mr. Wright.
BARNEY TWILL (Widgett’s Page and Light Porter) Mr. Ryan.
JACOB BROWN (A Hairdresser at the Opera) Mr. Munyard.
POSTMAN   Mr. Lindon.
WAITER   Mr. Mitchenson.
MDLLE. CHERI BOUNCE (An Opera Dancer) Miss E. Harding.
MARY WHITE (A Young Laundress) Miss Woolgar.

TIME OF REPRESENTATION.—Fifty minutes.

COSTUME.

WHITTINGTON WIDGETTS.—First dress: Blue coat; white vest; gray plaid trousers. Second dress: Green coat; pink vest. Third dress: Black coat.

BARNEY TWILL.—Green page’s suit.

JACOB BROWN.—Puce frock coat; blue vest; nankeen trousers.

MDLLE. CHERI BOUNCE.—Fashionable silk dress; blue satin visite, trimmed with lace; pink bonnet.

MARY WHITE.—First dress: Pink print dress; green shawl; and straw bonnet. Second dress: Blue blouse; drab leggings; red cravat; and fancy cap. Third dress: Drab paletot; white vest; and trousers.

STAGE DIRECTIONS.

EXITS AND ENTRANCES.—R. means Right; L. Left; D. F. Door in Flat; R. D. Right Door; L. D. Left Door; S. E. Second Entrance; U. E. Upper Entrance; M. D. Middle Door; L. U. E. Left Upper Entrance; R. U. E. Right Upper Entrance; L. S. E. Left Second Entrance; P. S. Prompt Side; O. P. Opposite Prompt.

RELATIVE POSITIONS.—R. means Right; L. Left; C. Centre; R. C. Right of Centre; L. C. Left of Centre.

R. RC. C. LC. L.

*** The Reader is supposed to be on the Stage, facing the Audience.