On paper, it sounds fine: Goldsmith's classic 18th-century comedy paired with a new play by April de Angelis exploring the era of David Garrick. In practice the two pieces, both directed by Max Stafford-Clark for Out of Joint and the National Theatre, complement each other unexpectedly: a spirited production of a defective new play is teamed with a drab revival of a comic masterpiece.
The main surprise is to find De Angelis, who wrote marvellously about Restoration actresses in Playhouse Creatures, coming up with such a crude, historically slapdash portrait of Garrick. Her main charge is that he failed to promote new drama, and that, in rejecting Goldsmith's She Stoops To Conquer in favour of Cumberland's The Fashionable Lover, he placed moral propriety above dramatic genius.
In pressing the charge, however, De Angelis falsifies facts. It is true that Goldsmith's play was picked up by Covent Garden while Cumberland's was done at Drury Lane. But they did not open simultaneously, nor was Cumberland's play the riot-inducing disaster De Angelis suggests. More seriously, De Angelis argues that Garrick was blackmailed into rejecting Goldsmith's comedy by a bluestocking who threatened to reveal that the great actor-manager's protege was his illegitimate son. Historically unsound, this also weakens De Angelis's case: it implies that Garrick's failure was dictated by personal vanity rather than professional misjudgment.
Even though the odds are stacked against Garrick, Jason Watkins gives a surprisingly winning performance. You warm to him as he rejects slapstick stereotype in humanising Ben Jonson's Abel Drugger, or rebuts Dr Johnson's anti-theatrical prejudices. Monica Dolan as a free-swearing Peg Woffington and Fritha Goodey as a string-pulling Mrs Garrick also lend weight to genial caricatures in a lively production of a historically dubious play.
But Stafford-Clark's normally sure touch deserts him when it comes to She Stoops To Conquer. If the comedy takes an age to rise, it is partly because Julian McGowan's design places ochre-and-russet costumes against a dark, wood-panelled set. Christopher Staines as Young Marlow, who mistakes a country house for an inn, also underplays the character's stammering hesitancy in the face of women of his own class. And Owen Sharpe treats the rustic booby, Tony Lumpkin, as if he were a Black Country spiv. Ian Redford is a splendidly apoplectic Hardcastle, Jane Wood is genuinely touching as his wife and the play's genius eventually triumphs over the production's dullness. But what starts out as an ingenious pairing ultimately does justice neither to Goldsmith nor Garrick.
· In rep until March 29. Box office: 020-7452 3000.
