The Recruiting Officer

About

Farquhar's 1706 comedy — based on his own experience as a recruiting officer in Shrewsbury — follows Captain Plume's efforts to recruit soldiers and simultaneously pursue a romantic conquest, complicated by his sergeant Kite's even more ingenious stratagems. The play is more genially realistic than most Restoration comedy — it is set in a provincial market town, not London, and its characters have a warmth that the genre's metropolitan types often lack. Brecht adapted it as Pauken und Trompeten (1955), recognizing in it the same intersection of military farce and social satire that animates his own work.