Regency romp finally hits stage

It has taken 200 years for Fanny Burney's satirical comedy A Busy Day to reach the West End stage, and the journey has been hazardous and circuitous to say the least. Tonight it finally opens at the Lyric Theatre in Shaftesbury Avenue in a Bristol Old Vic production starring Stephanie Beacham as the appalling snob Lady Wilhelmina Tylney, and Sara Crowe as the rich and vengeful Hon Miss Percival.

"It's a really rich, rollicking, rumbustious Regency romp and about as politically correct as Ali G," said Miss Beacham, best known for her role as Sable Colby in Dynasty. "It is amazing that it has not had a major production until now."

For most of the 200 years since the play was written, it has been "lost" and was only rediscovered in the Fifties in the New York Public Library. Even then it did not get its first fringe performance until 1993 in Bristol. Commissioned to write the play by Sheridan, who promised to stage it at Drury Lane, Burney was still working on it when she had to leave England to join her new French husband General d'Arblay in Paris.

She wrote the play out of desperation for money as Gen D'Arblay was a penniless exile from the French Revolution. She managed to finished the play in Paris, but the renewed outbreak of war with England meant that the d'Arblays were trapped in France for 10 years, and it was never produced.

While still in Paris in 1811, Burney discovered a lump in her breast which was eventually removed by Napoleon's surgeon in an operation lasting 17 minutes which she endured with only a wine cordial, wine and laudanum. She survived the ordeal to follow Gen d'Arblay to Brussels during the campaign against Napoleon and to witness Wellington's victory at Waterloo, after which the couple were free to return to England.

However, Gen d'Arblay died soon after their return and although Burney went back to live in London, she was 64 and too harried by "home and bosom strokes" to re-invent herself as a dramatist. Both Miss Beacham and Miss Crowe regard Burney very highly. "She was a modern woman. She did not get married till she was 42, she chose someone she loved and she had a baby at 44," said Miss Beacham.

She was very much her own woman, which was why she had the ability to be so perceptive and honest about other people. But it had its dangers. "I believe her friends were glad for her own well-being that the play was not produced because it's more than mere alternative comedy. It would have caused outrage."

In A Busy Day, which is set in the clubs, salons and ballrooms of Regency London, Burney traces the fortunes of Eliza, a young heiress arriving back in London from the British trading post of Calcutta. Her family have made a lot of money in the City but are ill-at-ease in the circles in which they now move. The introduction of Eliza's family to the haughty parents of her husband-to-be is the cue for a series of farcical misunderstandings.

Burney could hardly have been better placed to observe society, spending five "miserable" years as a courtier in the household of Queen Charlotte. But they provided the material for her novels like Evelina and her famous diaries.

These record in detail the trauma of George III's illness and her description of being chased round Kew Gardens by him became a key scene in the film The Madness of King George. Tonight's opening of A Busy Day marks another step in the recognition of Burney, which will reach some kind of climax in June 2002, the 250th anniversary of her birth.