After seeing the RSC's direly unfunny The City Madam in Stratford last week, I'm thinking of hiring a charabanc to bring all those involved to Southwark Playhouse for a lesson on how to play period comedy. This sparkling production by Jessica Swale of Hannah Cowley's long-neglected play probably cost a fraction of what the RSC usually spends but is stylish, fresh and very funny. It's no surprise for anyone who saw the same director's stunning version of Sheridan's The Rivals at the same small venue under the railway arches in January 2010. At the time I compared its impact to drinking champagne for three hours, and I've no hesitation about saying the same thing this time.
Hannah Cowley's play was a big success in 1780, though the entertaining programme for the show tells us that it was Sheridan himself who withdrew it from the Drury Lane repertoire after the retirement of David Garrick. It's a skilful variation on many of the stock themes and characters of 18th century comedy, though it lacks a single character as memorable as Sheridan's Mrs Malaprop. Cowley's writing uses a lot of standard themes to set up its comic conflicts -- French sophistication and English simplicity, country naivety and city guile, innocence and seduction -- but its conflicts between men and women have a sharp feminist edge. Here the women are firmly in charge, driving the plot at the expense of the men and emerging triumphant. Letitia Hardy the heroine is betrothed in childhood to Doricourt, an elegant young chap who has been brought up on the continent. When they meet again in a lawyer's office to formalise arrangements for the marriage, she thinks he's a dish, but is worried that he thinks her insipid. So she sets up a risky scheme to annoy him, gambling that that hatred will turn to love. When the two finally appear on stage together, nearly an hour into the play, Letitia pretends to be really really obnoxious to Doricourt, but the dialogue in this scene doesn't quite ring true; Cowley is a good dramatist, but she can't quite push her characters far enough to turn them into a real warring couple like Beatrice and Benedick. Instead she falls back on a more conventional stratagem for Letitia, allowing her to seduce Doricourt in disguise at a masked ball. Despite the fact that the leading couple don't actually spend much time on stage together, the play has a very lively and satisfying final scene. There's also a well-tailored subplot involving the newly married Lady Frances Touchwood, a naive young person from far-away Shropshire, and her over-protective and jealous husband.
The cast, some of them relative newcomers, all produce performances to relish, particularly Gina Beck as Letitia and Hannah Spearitt as Lady Frances. Egged on by Maggie Steed as the widow Mrs Racket and Jackie Clune as her sidekick Miss Ogle, these two female leads are just terrific, capturing the balance between innocence and what Doricourt calls 'spirit, fire, l'air enjoue'. The director has succeeded in getting the actors to go beyond the comic stereotypes and find real human beings in their characters. The young male leads, Michael Lindall as Doricourt and Joseph MacNab as Sir George Touchwood are convincingly supported by Jeremy Joyce as Saville, Marc Baylis as the seducer Courtall, and Tim Dorsett as Villers. Together they make up a laddish gang on the threshold of adulthood who oscillate between maturity and childishness. There are superb cameo performances by Robin Soans as Mr Hardy, everyone's favourite country squire, and Christopher Logan as the gossipy Flutter.
Jessica Swale's production adds some sharp musical interludes which give the play a more contemporary feel, and allow the actors to break through the fourth wall and interact with the audience; the use of period dress, rather than pickling the play in 1780, is delicately combined with some up-to-date touches, such as the young men drinking from bottles rather than glasses before they go to the masquerade. The scene brings up a flash of recognition -- these are today's City boys swigging a quick Peroni from the fridge before they hit town. The director keeps the play in period while also injecting it with a contemporary sense of fun that communicates itself to the audience.
That's a difficult combination to bring off -- dying is easy, but comedy is fiendishly difficult. Maria Aitken's book for actors on how to play high comedy says: 'The effort involved must be imperceptible: one has to acquire the cleverness, the articulacy, the febrility of the characters -- and then make the whole laborious excercise seem like swimming through silk.' One of the many pleasures of this show is that it delivers not only superb timing and brisk pace, but a really subtle use of movement. Not many young directors have the Trevor Nunn ability to manipulate a large cast (sixteen actors in this case) on stage in a vigorous way that still foregrounds the words and doesn't confuse the audience. Ms Swale -- who has also directed with great success at Shakespeare's Globe and in the much smaller space of the Arcola -- will, I hope, soon be following other women directors such as Marianne Elliott and Thea Sharrock up the theatrical ladder to direct plays in grander places with bigger budgets.
Given the good reviews, I'm surprised that this show hasn't yet sold out in the way that The Rivals did last year. That production had a well-known author and a major star in Celia Imrie, but this revival is perhaps even more worth seeing, precisely because it's a play by a writer whose work has been neglected, and because it delivers an evening of sheer enjoyment without the stardust of any big names. At £20 top price, this is far better value than a ticket to a West End show at three times the cost. It runs until October 1.
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