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Peter Hall’s revival of Sheridan’s eighteenth-century courtship comedy is a stately pleasure craft, manned by a crew of boobies, fortune-hunters, ageing relatives and sentimental virgins. It’s nattily captained here by the 80-year-old director and his star actors, Penelope Keith and Peter Bowles, in a production which set sail from Bath, where the play is set.
Back in its Georgian heyday, the city was a naughty watering spot, and Simon Higlett’s curvaceous design of its Royal Crescent is as tempting as an heiress’s bosom. Sheridan’s play, inspired by his own impecunious rise through Bath society, boasts a lovely pair of heiresses – faithful Julia and her petulant cousin, Miss Lydia Languish. Robyn Addison’s Lydia is so gorgeously languid that every drawn-out vowel merits its own chaise longue. She almost deserves her devious young suitor, Captain Jack Absolute, played by Tam Williams as an arrogant pretty boy, prone to unscripted and unconvincing dalliances with whores.
Aside from this one slightly silly attempt to sex things up – and opening scenes which exist mainly as scaffolding for the double-dealing fun that’s to follow – Hall’s production is meticulous. It brings his trademark clarity to the characters, who are individuals as well as types, and to Sheridan’s script, which Hall is right to trust. The young outwit their guardians in the play but in this production, the oldsters outclass them in wily comedy.
Penelope Keith, as Lydia’s obstructive aunt Mrs Malaprop, is an understated triumph. It would be easy to over-ham lines like ‘She’s as headstrong as an allegory on the banks of the Nile,’, but Keith delivers her surreally misspoken verdicts with such smooth froideur and winning optimism that you feel for her even as you’re laughing. Peter Bowles, reunited with Keith for the first time since ‘To the Manor Born’, is wonderfully choleric as Jack’s suspicious father, Sir Anthony Absolute. Visibly caught between two fierce impulses (to guffaw at his son’s chip-off-the-old-block audacity, or to give him the caning he so ripely deserves), it’s a beautifully paradoxical portrayal: likeable and hilarious.
Annabel Scholey as the ill-used Julia brings grace and an undertow of patient sadness to complement the sparkling silliness elsewhere. With the ladies upholstered in enough striped silk to curtain the entire Royal Crescent, it’s a sumptuous evening of mature pleasure.