“To be sure, aunts of all kinds are damned bad things,” declares Tony Lumpkin in Oliver Goldsmith’s comedy of mistaken identities. We could be in PG Wodehouse territory, and director Lindsay Posner underlines the similarities by swapping the late 18th century for the 1920s and proving that chumps are chumps whatever the century. Lumpkin spends his time down the Three Pigeons talking balls with the local rugby team, and Hastings and Marlow are the chinless wonders who mistake the home of Mr Hardcastle for a country inn, and Marlow his prospective bride, Kate Hardcastle, for a barmaid.
Simon Higlett’s design, which makes energetic use of the revolve to speed things up (and goodness, do they need a good shove), fills the Hardcastle home with a job lot of taxidermy. Sadly, it’s Goldsmith’s wondrously constructed comedy that gets stuffed in a dull production that lacks a light comic touch and which seldom finds the generosity of spirit that lurks within the humour, or the affection that the author feels for his characters, however idiotically they behave.
Michael Pennington is such a trooper that he delivers as the crusty but essentially decent Hardcastle, and Catherine Steadman has fun as his beloved daughter Kate, who realises that she must dissemble to win her man and does it with sublime wit and grace. But why she would want to win this Marlow – clearly a Bullingdon Club member – remains unresolved.
It’s a play that can seem contrived and creaky unless it gets a terrific production and top-notch performances from every member of the cast.
That doesn’t happen here, and there is some miscasting: Harry Michell is pleasant enough as problem-child Lumpkin, but never enough of the booby, and while Anita Dobson captures the self-deceiving vanity of Mrs Hardcastle, she fails to make comic capital in a performance that is both over-declamatory and underpowered.
- At Theatre Royal, Bath, until 18 July. Box office: 01225 448844.
