Since it premiered in 1777, Sheridan’s high comedy of low morals has been shining a light on our addiction to gossip, backstabbing and malice through a carefully crafted drama of concealment. Andrew Hilton’s revival, a departure into a wider repertoire for Shakespeare at the Tobacco Factory, frequently uses light to reflect on how teasingly modern Sheridan’s world of tongue-wagging gossips and salacious rumourmongers feels today. The gilt is already peeling off the plaster columns in Emma Bailey’s design. There’s no need for the newly written Twitter-referencing prologue and epilogue, however teasingly well they are delivered by Byron Mondahl, who plays the foppish Sir Benjamin Backbite like a great big poisonous pink baby.
There’s much to enjoy in a play that delivers plenty of one-liners and which, like Lady Sneerwell (Julia Hills), understands “there is no possibility of being witty without a little ill-nature”. But this is a comedy with a heart, realised here in the relationship between Christopher Bianchi’s Sir Peter Teazle, who has the hangdog expression of a dejected basset hound, and Daisy Whalley’s Lady Teazle, a stroppy 18th-century teenager. For all their differences, you suspect that these two will work their marriage out.
The directness of Whalley’s performance style is a breath of fresh air in a production that lacks snappiness and sharpness, and the exquisite detail in characterisation that makes Shakespeare at this address such a joy. There are passages when it almost feels embalmed. The space works against the famous scene behind a screen, when the two plots in the play come together and Joseph Surface (Paapa Essiedu), who pretends to be a model young gentlemen to hide his perfidy, is revealed as a hypocrite. Quite fun, but not fun enough to justify the leisurely three-hour playing time.
• At Tobacco Factory until 9 May. Box office: 0117-902 0344.
