Edith Wharton's characters are always getting into trouble at the theatre. In The Age of Innocence, it's the place where Newland Archer first meets the disgraced Countess Olenska (and is mortified, because everyone sees her in his fiancée's box), and where, during a production of Boucicault's The Shaughraun, he's drawn to her. There are rules, of course, unwritten ones, acknowledged only when broken, about how to arrive ('in a Brown coupé was almost as honourable a way of arriving as in one's own carriage') and when ('it was "not the thing" to arrive early'). A woman, married or unmarried, must go with a suitable companion or not go at all: 'One knew what to make of a woman who was "alone at the opera".' In The Custom of the Country, the parvenue Undine Spragg, who loves the theatre, persuades her father to rent her a night's use of a box, but society makes her nervous, and she becomes 'no longer capable of following the action on the stage'.

LRB 8 March 2007 | PDF Download