Dion Boucicault - A success in Europe and America

Born Dionysius Lardner Boursiquot in 1820, ‘Boucicault’ — a man destined to become the most electrifying dramatist of the Victorian era — had a whiff of sensation about him from the start.

It’s now generally accepted that he was not the son of Dublin wine merchant Samuel Boursiquot, but rather the son of Dionysius Lardner, a lodger in the house of Boursiquot’s wife, Anne Darley. She — a sister to the mathematician George Darley — was some years younger than her husband and, if the young Dion’s name was any indication, she was openly involved with Lardner, a noted encyclopaedist.

When Lardner took a post in London, the young Dion, his mother Anne, and three of her other children followed. Dion did return to study in Dublin, and the affairs of Ireland would remain central to him, providing him with the context for many of his most successful plays. Boucicault grabbed the attention of the English theatre world in 1841 with his comedy London Assurance, the start of a career that saw him involved in almost 200 theatrical productions.

While winning renown as a character actor, as a writer Boucicault’s gift to theatre were his remarkable innovations in stage mechanics and intricate plotting. And while not above pilfering the odd plot or scene from other plays, he was instrumental in securing for playwrights the benefit of copyright protection and royalty payments.

In his personal life a hint of scandal always dogged Boucicault. (Often, he courted it.) Early into his career he married Anne Guiot, a wealthy widow, who then passed away shortly into their marriage. Her swift passing and Boucicault’s reticence about her death fed some lurid stories about what had befallen her. As his career soared, he repeatedly fell out with theatres and business partners, and while he earned huge amounts of money, he repeatedly lost it all.

Boucicault met his second wife, actress Agnes Robertson, in 1852. The pair would have six children and appear together in countless plays. Yet, he would part with Agnes in Australia late in his life, running off to marry, bigamously, Louise Thorndyke. It had been Agnes’s blossoming career that took Boucicault to New York in 1853. In America he enjoyed mixed fortunes in theatre management but once again found tremendous success with his own plays.

The Octoroon – a bold melodrama about the pressing issue of slavery – was followed by The Colleen Bawn, an Irish drama that became a massive hit in New York and London. In the Adelphi theatre in London it ran for an unprecedented 330 days.

By then, Boucicault’s reputation was staked on perfectly pitched melodramas, vivid characters and thrilling ‘sensation’ scenes. To top an exploding steamboat in The Octoroon, in The Colleen Bawn he had a small lake built into the actual set, into which the hero Myles-na-Coppaleen (played by Boucicault himself) dove to rescue a young maiden.

Myles was a rehabilitated version of ‘the stage Irishman’, a stock character popular in Elizabethan and Restoration comedies. Boucicault said he had made it his “vocation” to abolish this stereotype, but it’s more accurate to say that in The Colleen Bawn, and in subsequent hits Arrah-na-Pogue and The Shaughran, he radicalised it, retaining much of its comic power while making the character a subversively powerful and heroic figure.

His Irish plays were the first to put Ireland onstage and there was more than a hint of nationalist sentiment running through them. However, it is the verve and visual splendour of Boucicault’s storytelling and his native comic powers that have ensured these plays remain popular.