REVIEW: The School for Scandal – Malvern Theatres (Tuesday, April 16 to Saturday, April 20).
IT was only after I’d seen the publicity shots when I realised that Tilted Wig’s take on this comedy of manners would ironically prove to be rather thin on the ground as far as your actual period thatch was concerned.
Word association you see. Wigs were big in the 18th century, so I was sort of expecting – and indeed looking forward, if I’m honest – to seeing some seriously outrageous hair.
No chance. For Richard Brinsley Sheridan’s tirade at Georgian hypocrisy and the societal affectations of his own time appears to have been transported to the inter-war years of the 20th century.
So, this is presumably the Jazz Age. Yet the setting is curiously devoid of any of the music of that era, perhaps for reasons best known to director Sean Aydon.
Not that any of this matters, because the key ingredients of this sumptuous banquet of banality is a subject dear to all our hearts. Gossip, tittle-tattle, bitching… call it what you will.
For nothing changes. Virtue-signal as much as you like folks, but let’s admit it - we all love a bit of backstabbing. No exceptions, right? And therein lies the eternal appeal of Sheridan’s masterpiece.
Sir Peter Teazle (Joseph Marcell) has wed a much younger woman and right from the start becomes obsessed with the notion that the new Lady Teazle (Lydea Perkins) might well be seeking comfort elsewhere.
There’s nothing going on, but then she has the thought… why not put flesh on the bones of this self-fulfilling prophecy? If you’ll pardon the expression.
Inevitably, destiny comes in the form of stupendous cad Joseph (Alex Phelps) who is not the only one to deduce that Lady Teazle’s endlessly fluttering, mascara-drenched eyelashes are sending Morse code signals reading ‘hey, let’s go for it, big boy’.
As you might expect, Sir Peter soon begins to regret about not being careful of what you don’t wish for. If you get my meaning.
Joseph Marcell is an absolute powerhouse of cuckolded confusion, his pathetic appeals, often fired directly at the audience, only serving to emphasise the sheer futility of his wretched existence.
Alex Phelps, too, milks the bounder role for all it’s worth, a kind of Dick Dastardly to Marcell’s Muttley. Meanwhile, Lady Sneerwell (Emily-Jane McNeill) slithers across the boards spewing unfettered beastliness, her rouged lips snarling, curling and contorting like a couple of mating earthworms just unearthed by the gardener’s spade.
All of this is in stark contrast to Ayesha Griffiths’ Maria, who soon sheds her squeaky-clean pink dress and dons the kind of gear one normally encounters in a 1920s Chicago speakeasy, her lines spoken with the staccato stutter of a Thompson machine gun.
The glorious thing about Sheridan is that like all free spirits, who also happen to be writers, he didn’t give a fiddler’s cuss for the officially approved wisdoms of the puritanical Georgian middle-classes, mercilessly mocking them without fear or favour.
Fast-forward 250 years and you realise how badly this politically correct straitjacket of a world of ours so desperately needs another Sheridan to emerge… and deliver us all from the same old, time-rusted tyrannies.
Star rating: ***** five out of five.