Everyone is putting on a performance in Dominic Hill’s revival of Sheridan’s good-natured 1775 comedy. It’s a play that sets love against money, the old against the young, and reason against emotion as Mrs Malaprop conspires to marry off her heiress niece, Lydia Languish, to Captain Jack Absolute, with the endorsement of Sir Anthony Absolute, a man used to getting his way in all things and who thinks no good can come from teaching girls to read. But the hot-headed Lydia, her head full of romantic novels and determined to marry a man of no fortune, is already in love with the penniless Ensign Beverley, little knowing that Beverley and Jack are one and the same.
In Tom Rogers’ design the stage is one vast dressing room where rails of clothes are on display and wigs are primped, and the way the action is seen through a series of frames heightens the artifice and constantly reminds us that, while we are watching a play performed in the theatre, for the demimonde of late-18th-century Bath all the world was a stage. The servants, Fag (Shaun Miller) and Lucy (Lily Donovan), can often be glimpsed wandering around the side of the stage watching the action unfold with sly amusement.
It’s a neat device that plays on the drama’s themes of public performance and private deception and deceit. But it’s one that is not always quite carried through in a production that sometimes lacks the courage of its convictions. The publicity notes describe the play as an “elegant comedy of manners”, but Hill’s production is always at its most interesting when it is most inelegant and messy and extreme.
Its contradictions are most apparent in the performance of Lucy Briggs-Owen who plays Lydia like a demented Made in Chelsea clone, a stroppy, spoilt, recognisably 21st-century privileged teenager with eyelashes like bats, a nasal whine and a highly developed sense of entitlement. It’s not pretty, but it’s bold and often effective on its own terms even if it doesn’t always sit easily within the production’s tamer and more timid moments and playing styles.
That said, the Languish and Absolute romance is neatly contrasted with the relationship between Jessica Hardwick’s sensible Julia and Nicholas Bishop’s over-sensitive Faulkland, a sort of 18th-century emo who can’t stop himself from constantly testing his beloved’s affections. Julie Legrand, a late replacement for Maggie Steed as Mrs Malaprop, grows in confidence as the evening progresses and mines both the sadness and unwitting comic potential of a woman who is an ageing, poorer ugly-sister version of Lydia.
It feels as if Hill’s instinct was to reinvent the comedy as a full-blown farce but has reined in that impulse resulting in something far more conventional, which sometimes unwittingly highlights the convolutions of Sheridan’s plotting rather than making it appear seamless. An engaging enough evening but too much a “pineapple of politeness”.
• At Bristol Old Vic until October 1. Box office: 0117 987 7877. Then touring to Glasgow and Liverpool.
