The Orange Tree’s artistic director Tom Littler brings the same assured touch to Richard Sheridan’s eighteenth-century comedy of identity confusion as he did to Oliver Goldsmith’s She Stoops to Conquer this time two years ago. He’s aided by a top-drawer cast who know how to tap into the play’s brand of jubilant absurdity.
To test the sincerity of the love of heiress Lydia Languish (Zoe Brough), the equally loaded Captain Jack Absolute (Kit Young) has wooed her in the guise of the lowly Sergeant Beverley. However, this backfires when, due to matchmaking by his dad, Sir Anthony Absolute (Robert Bathurst), and Lydia’s aunt, Mrs Malaprop (Patricia Hodge), Jack discovers both that he has become his own ‘rival’ and that other suiters are piling up.
Littler treads nimbly through the archly funny contrivances that make up this play. He keeps the same setting – the city of Bath – but has cannily shifted the time period to the 1920s and made a few minor modernisations to the language. The decade’s changing social and gender morés, signified by between-scene bursts of joyful Charleston dancing, neatly serve to renew the focus on the male pomposity and anxiety that drive the plot.
Because, make no mistake, the joke is on the boys here. A twinkly eyed Young makes for a charmingly incorrigible Jack, but his plan absolutely deserves to fail. From Bathurst’s amusingly histrionic Sir Anthony to James Sheldon’s clownishly insecure ‘Faulty’ Faulkland, who tests the affection and patience of fiancé Julia Melville (Boadicea Ricketts), the men scoff at the impact on women of reading novels – a major eighteenth-century trope – while acting as melodramatically as any trashy romance.
Brough tempers the touch of Pulp’s ‘Common People’ in her rich kid Lydia’s naïve romanticisation of poverty with her growing clear-sightedness. Ricketts stands out as Julia, switching with skill from comedy to affecting sincerity in one of the play’s more genuine moments when she confronts Faulty. Meanwhile, Hodge is predictably hilarious as the play’s true breakout character, bringing an endearingly deathly earnestness to the language-mangling Mrs Malaprop.
This production keeps the laughter rate high, skewering pretentiousness with some well-aimed potshots at fragile egos. It’s an excellent pick-me-up for the post-Christmas slump.