Watching Lindsay Posner's pretty, pleasing, picturesque revival of Sheridan's infallible comedy, I had a strange sensation that I was sitting at the Haymarket or even Chichester. The audience purred its approval. But, after the cutting-edge brilliance of Steven Pimlott's Richard II, which is playing in the Other Place, it struck me that the RSC was cushioning its exploration of Shakespeare's Histories with nice, safe, reassuring theatre.
Mrs Malaprop warns us against "delusions to the past". But Ashley Martin-Davis's set design, with its detachable blocks of miniaturised Bath houses, triggered a memory of John Gunter's similar sets for Peter Wood's National Theatre revival in the 80s. The key difference is that Wood placed Sheridan's comedy of intrigue in the context of real life: we saw the tetchy Anthony Absolute at breakfast or glimpsed tailors' apprentices beavering away in upstairs rooms.
Given that Sheridan's play derived directly from his own Bath-time experience of elopement and duels, this seemed precisely right. However, Posner's production, with its footlights, false proscenium and preliminary dance, takes its cue as much from period theatre as from life.
I don't wish to sound too curmudgeonly: some attempt has clearly been made to reassess the characters. Lydia Languish, who sees life in terms of romantic novels and who embraces her lover as a penniless ensign but rejects him as an established captain, is played by Emily Raymond as a pampered, pouting brat. Even better, Wendy Craig treats Mrs Malaprop not as a conscious grotesque, but as a woman whose verbal slips stem, perversely, from an overwhelming passion for language. This is a seriously good performance and when her romantic follies are mocked, you get a hint of the harsh cruelty underlying Bath's fashionable glitter.
David Tennant is dullish as the disguised Jack Absolute, but Benjamin Whitrow makes no mistake with his tyrannical father: like Michael Hordern, he stresses the character's bubbling lechery and reveals an underlying compassion, as he alone comforts the discarded Mrs Malaprop.
Des McAleer lends the deluded Hibernian, Sir Lucius O'Trigger, a twinkling charm even if Ian Hughes is too ploddingly sane to get to the heart of the erotically tormented Faulkland. But the general impression was of a decent, decorative revival of Sheridan's dazzling first play that clearly sent the audience away happy. Is it ungrateful to expect of the Swan something more challenging than amiable diversion?
In rep until October 5. Box Office: 01789-403403.
