The Colonel (play)

One of the Punch cartoons featuring the colonel

The Colonel is a farce in three acts by F. C. Burnand based on Jean François Bayard's Le mari à la campagne (The Husband in the Country), first produced in 1844 and produced in London in 1849 by Morris Barnett, adapted as The Serious Family. The story concerns the efforts of two aesthetic impostors to gain control of a family fortune by converting a man's wife and mother-in-law to follow aestheticism. He is so unhappy that he seeks the company of a widow in town. His friend, an American colonel, intervenes to persuade the wife to return to conventional behavior and obey her husband to restore domestic harmony, and the colonel marries the widow himself.

The Colonel was first produced on 2 February 1881, and its initial run at the Prince of Wales's Theatre lasted for 550 performances, an extraordinary run in those days.[1] Simultaneously, a second company was touring the British provinces with the play. On 4 October 1881, The Colonel received a command performance before Queen Victoria (the first play to do so in twenty years (since the death of Prince Albert in 1861).[2] The play transferred to the Imperial Theatre in 1883 and then to the new Prince of Wales Theatre in 1884, built by the producer of The Colonel, Edgar Bruce, from the profits from the comedy's extraordinary success.[3] In July 1887, there was a revival at the Comedy Theatre.

  1. ^ Information about long runs in London
  2. ^ Denney, Colleen. At the Temple of Art: The Grosvenor Gallery, 1877-1890 (2000) Fairleigh Dickinson Univ. Press, p. 109 ISBN 0-8386-3850-3
  3. ^ Information on the history of the Prince of Wales Theatre