The School for Scandal
Royal Shakespeare Theatre
Things are certainly different at the RSC this season. Nobody could say that the new artistic directors Daniel Evans and Tamara Harvey are tentative or unadventurous. Beginning in the week of the General Election the play examines issues of gossip, slander, sleaze and mud-throwing which are almost too much in our minds at the moment. It’s surprising how many actions and statements of the characters remind us of the figures in the election news, without the director having to do much except add bits not written by Sheridan. There are no obvious caricatures of particular contemporary politicians, but there don’t need to be to make the play relevant and topical.
I’ve been trying to think how to describe the style of Tinuke Craig’s production. The nearest I can get is surrealistic. There’s an almost bare stage with three large traps which rise to reveal characters and bits of set. The play opens with a pink floor and pink bead curtained backdrop. Pink and black are the hallmarks of Alex Lowde’s design: black representing the characters who are closest to ‘moral’ with the exception of the honest and virtuous Maria who is in a simple white dress, pink and other colours representing those who are far from it or (in the case of Charles Surface) who are thought to be.
The costumes are extraordinary. Based on eighteenth century ones, they are overblown and often ridiculous, with enormous wigs and exaggerated colours and lines. Sometimes, though, what was funny to begin with becomes over-mannered. Mrs Candour’s misshapen and floosyish dress and Lady Sneerwell’s courtly mantua gown, so wide that she has to enter and exit sideways, together with Charles Surface’s dress in the Temple of Dissipation scene with his dissolute mates which reveals his underpants every time he sits down, all lose their amusement as time goes on. I wondered whether this was deliberate to show how we tire of the ludicrous costumes of the morally dissolute gossip-mongers just as we tire of the relentless corrupution as the play moves towards its denouement and moral resolution.
There is a fair amount not written by Sheridan. The Prologue originally delivered by Sir Peter Teazle and written by David Garrick is replaced by a modern version given to Snake and George Coleman’s epilogue delivered by Lady Teazle is given to Maria to implant the modern relevance in the audience as they leave the theatre. There are lots of little interpolations some of which are very funny such as Lappet’s completely unexpected ‘Fuck off’ and Joseph Surface’s ‘Mr Stanley I presume’. What I liked especially was the absence of the theatrically trendy mannerism of men playing women and women playing men as well as the absence of ‘colour blind’ casting which has been so annoying and unconvincing in recent years at the RSC and elsewhere. So Sir Peter’s statement that he married a ‘girl bred wholly in the country’ makes sense when he has a black wife.
The acting is pretty strong. Sir Oliver Surface doesn’t appear until the second half of the play when its focus shifts from gossip and sleaze to the theme of inheritance, but when he does Wil Johnson is wonderful, both in his own guise and in his disguises as Premium and Stanley. Emily Houghton does a good job of playing Mrs Candour with her pasty and expressive face, even though her called for express train delivery at the beginning made it hard to hear unless she was facing us. Tinuke Craig does unexpected things with both the Surface brothers. Stefan Adegbola, the hypocritical and lying sentimentalist delivers his trite moralisation in a spotlight with exaggerated gestures and John Leader presents Charles’s dissipation with energy and physical versatility while at the same time revealing a believable and soft centre. Geoffrey Streatfield makes Sir Peter Teazle convincingly dull and ordinary in a world of ridiculously overblown characters as does Yasemin Ozdemir as Maria. They are both meant to be stolid and at the end we grasp the moral superiority of black and white. Tara Tijani certainly makes the contrast between Lady Teazle’s enjoyment of scandalmongering and her transformation at the end of the play clear and reasonably convincing.
Sheridan is not really interested in the other characters and so the director’s challenge is to do something with them. Patrick Walshe McBride endows Sir Benjamin Backbite with an overblown costume, a mannered stance and a very silly walk but there isn’t much to his character. I didn’t understand the extra prominence given to Snake, why the character was dressed in black or why Tadeo Martinez played him with an American accent.
You won’t see a School for Scandal quite like this. Most of the actors are unrecognisable from their roles in The Merry Wives of Windsor so it makes for a very interesting pairing, now that the new artistic directors have brought back a welcome touch of repertory theatre to the RSC. We certainly enjoyed seeing both plays close together and engaging with the performers’ versatility. They are both well worth seeing and a stay at Moss Cottage will ensure that you have an excellent visit to Stratford.