The School for Scandal
Stratford pulls out all the stops on cast, design and costumes
For the one production artistic director Antoni Cimolino is helming this year, the Stratford Festival has pulled out all the stops: topgun cast, frothy costumes by Julie Fox to die for, comedy wigs aplenty, and a scenic design (also by Fox) that had me chuckling in astonishment.
This lavishness of performance, design, and technical mastery is put in service of Richard Brinsley Sheridan’s 1777 play, a sophisticated set of interweaving intrigues that, while driven by silly gossip, adds up to a stinging, still-relevant commentary on the damaging personal effects of a culture of superficiality and fake news.
Cimolino’s command of the material is evident from the production’s first moment, a cold open which has lead actor Geraint Wyn Davies wandering onstage in street clothes holding a smartphone. Just a few lines connecting our contemporary era of scandal to this historical one (and a selfie) later, and the set launches into the first in its series of magical transformations, in which walls glide back and forth, shift diagonally, and even fold up like the corrugated interior of a box.
These set shifts aren’t just wow moments, but also suggest a world of shifting surfaces where you can’t tell who’s really calling the shots. Nick Bottomley’s projections splash tabloid headlines about the play’s characters onto the walls as they move, another combination of technology and textual reference that connects now to then.
The first enacted scene bracingly exposes the shallow, constructed nature of the characters’ public identities. In her dressing room, Lady Sneerwell (the mighty Maev Beaty) assembles herself for the day while exchanging news with the columnist Snake (Anusree Roy). We see a whited-out face and scraggly head transformed by makeup and wigs into something picture-perfect, and — OMG, did they really just go there? — a direct connection is made between gossip and excretion.
The play weaves together two plots: the strained May-December marriage between Sir Peter (Wyn Davies) and Lady Teazle (Shannon Taylor), and the question of which of the Surface brothers, Joseph (Tyrone Savage) or Charles (Sébastien Heins), is really a “man of sentiment,” which in Sheridan’s terms means a compassionate, standup guy.
A number of secondary characters intervene and comment from the sidelines, and it’s one of the joys of seeing theatre produced at this level that even these smaller roles are played by comedic heavy hitters including Beaty, Tom Rooney, Rod Beattie, Birgit Wilson, Joseph Ziegler and Brent Carver.
Savage wisely takes his time building his portrait of the self-serving Joseph — playing it too oily early on would leave him nowhere to go; and Heins’s quality of openness suits the character of Charles, the party boy with a decent heart.
This is a long play, and at times you may find yourself wishing that 18th-century comedy came with a swipe-up function to move faster through rote business to the juicier posts. If all this added up to just surface it would feel like a long haul with insufficient payoff for present sensibilities. It’s Wyn Davies that provides the audience its emotional anchor: Sir Peter is the play’s lone straight-shooter, the only central figure who never dissembles. His lovable vulnerability is totally winning, but the character also discovers his steel when, in the final act, he oh-so-satisfyingly orders the frivolous secondary characters to “leave my house.”
This was a fitting capper to Stratford’s bravura opening week delivering seven premières in six days: in it the Festival puts its level of resource and deep bench of talent — unmatched in Canada — to masterfully serve up a complicated classic.