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If we go with the kind of heavy-handed punning ‘The Double Dealer’ favours, this revival of William Congreve’s rarely performed Restoration comedy could also be called ‘Laughs Laboured Lost’.
The evil Maskwell (a fitfully Machiavellian Edward MacLiam) double-crosses everybody in sight at the Touchwood residence in order to basically kidnap Cynthia, who he tells us he loves. Congreve’s second play, first staged in 1694, has all the hallmarks of an early work. It’s overwritten, overlong and over-full of its own cleverness.
This isn’t helped by director Selina Cadell’s production. She’s directed Congreve before, but the light touch she’s so successfully brought to other period comedies, like Richard Sheridan’s ‘The Rivals’, seems to have deserted her here. In place of sly knowingness, we get increasingly relentless mugging.
Restoration comedies are all about winkingly acknowledging the audience. But there’s breaking the fourth wall, then there’s throwing a rhyming Cliffs Notes about the play at us. A new verse prologue, written by Cadell and Eliza Thompson, is unnecessarily hand-holding.
It’s a shame, because Congreve’s various lampoons of a society of posturing, intellectual snobs are among the best bits – and immediately familiar without any meta-scaffolding. Just take a look at Twitter for people taking themselves hilariously seriously.
In the scenes in which the strained self-awareness that plagues this production drops away, some of the cast are genuinely funny. In particular, Jenny Rainsford, who Cadell also directed in ‘The Rivals’, is a delightfully affected Lady Plyant. Her off-kilter comic touch almost distracts from her poisonously written character.
In the end, this period-dressed production – in spite of the superficial modernity of its bolted-on prologue – is unadventurous. It never shifts gear or really attempts to grapple with Congreve’s ‘limited’ (and that’s putting it charitably) view of women.
What you’re left with is a lot of bowing, a distracting amount of twirling entrances and exits and a show you really wish was funnier.