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A drawing room play is a type of play, developed during the Victorian period in the United Kingdom of Great Britain and Ireland. They set middle-class characters confronting a social problem of the time with a comedic twist. [1] The play is formed from a blend of three parts: part well-made play, part society drama, part comedy of manners. [2]
Wilde's first West End drawing room play, Lady Windermere's Fan, ran at the St James's Theatre for 197 performances in 1892. [2] He briefly moved away from the genre to write his biblical tragedy Salome, after which he accepted a request from the actor-manager Herbert Beerbohm Tree for a new play for Tree's company at the Haymarket Theatre. [3]
Middle-class drawing room in Blackheath, London, 1841, painted by James Holland. In 18th-century London, the royal morning receptions that the French called levées were called "drawing rooms", with the sense originally that the privileged members of court would gather in the drawing room outside the king's bedroom, where he would make his first formal public appearance of the day.
In June 1893, with his second drawing room play, A Woman of No Importance, running successfully at the Haymarket Theatre, Oscar Wilde began writing An Ideal Husband for the actor-manager John Hare. He completed the first act while staying at a house he had taken in Goring-by-Sea, after which he named a leading character in the play. [1]
The earliest known use of the noun drawing room is in the mid-1600s, with the earliest evidence of drawing room appearing in 1635, from a Victorian-era memoir titled Steward's Household Accounts.
Deane revised the character into a suave aristocrat, who dresses formally and displays the polite manners expected in a Victorian drawing room. [31] Although the Count continues to be a foreign visitor in England, he no longer reflects negative stereotypes of eastern Europeans and Jews as he does in the novel. [ 32 ]
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The play is set in autumn 1860 in the drawing room of the Featherways family's house in Kent. The family, all dressed in mourning, have returned from the funeral of the paterfamilias. The group comprises his five children, Jasper, Lavinia, Richard, Harriet and Emily with, except for the unmarried Lavinia and RIchard, their spouses.