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Mining gossip for elevated humour
The School for Scandal Avon Theatre, Stratford
There’s a scene in The School for Scandal that the textbooks call “the screen scene.” Someone is concealed behind a decorative screen; somebody else pushes it over. This occasions the bewilderment of one character, the heartbreak of another, the humiliation of a third, the offstage confounding of a fourth, and the breathless laughter of the audience — all simultaneously. That, at least, is the theory.
Antoni Cimolino’s production is the only one I’ve seen to turn the theory into practice; to make the screen scene the great moment in English comedy that the books say it is. The moment itself is perfectly timed, and the ground before it has been thoroughly prepared by getting the audience involved with the people.
With this play, that is not always the easiest of tasks. A funny thing about The School for Scandal is that for the whole middle part of its action it forgets about its title. Richard Brinsley Sheridan’s comedy begins as a satirical portrait of the gossip scene in late 18th-century London. A bunch of upper-middle-class people amuse themselves and one another by spreading malicious rumours — stories involving unwanted pregnancies and the like — about their peers. It’s made easier for them by the birth of the newspaper industry. It seems that in 1777 almost every paper was a tabloid.
A new and enthusiastic recruit to the “scandalous college” is Lady Teazle, a country girl newly arrived in town as the bride of a much older husband, Sir Peter. He strongly disapproves of her keeping such company, as well he might. That isn’t the only ground of disagreement between them. In the traditional way of May-December marriages, they clash over her extravagance, his insecurity. It’s their relationship that takes over the play. He’s especially jealous of her feelings for the amiable spendthrift Charles Surface, not knowing that she’s actually being pursued by Charles’ sanctimonious brother Joseph. We’ve already learned that these two are wreaking havoc in the heart of Lady Sneerwell, scandalmonger-in-chief. She fancies Charles but has an alliance of villainous convenience with Joseph.
Then there’s Maria, Sir Peter’s ward; she loves Charles, and he her, but Joseph has designs on her as well. Trouble is, this information is conveyed to us before we’ve had a chance to meet half the people involved; the other half, having done the work of exposition, then disappear until the last act.
The School for Scandal, once it gets going, is a beautifully constructed play, but I have yet to encounter a production that made all the preliminary details crystal clear. Cimolino’s production can’t manage it either. In other respects, though, it’s the best I’ve seen: precise, humane and very funny.
The play is done in lovely period gear. Julie Fox having designed sets, costumes and this society’s allimportant wigs. Between scenes, however, projections nod at the social media that nourish the Snakes and Sneerwells of today.
Lady Sneerwell herself starts out thinking that the play is going to be about her, and Maev Beaty can sometimes make you wish she was right: bald and embittered at the start and splendidly furious on her return. Her various acolytes are served up with relish. Brigit Wilson is Mrs. Candour, who ruins more reputations by defending them than her associates could by defaming them. Rod Beattie plays cankered old Crabtree, and Tom Rooney is a Sir Benjamin Backbite who, for once, lives up, or down, to his surname and who sports the most mountainous coiffure of them all.
Still the production’s heart, like the play, is with the Teazles and Surfaces. Geraint Wyn Davies has the audience with him all the way as he navigates between Sir Peter’s good-heartedness and pigheadedness, captured for all time when he wonders wide-eyed how it comes about that, in all his quarrels with his wife, she is always in the wrong. Shannon Taylor stands up to him with mischievous spirit, and is outright superb in her great moment of shame and disillusion, her stature as an actress growing before your eyes. Sebastien Heins is an engaging Charles, and Tyrone Savage finds exactly the right tonality for the sententious commonplaces with which the hypocrite Joseph, “moral to the last drop,” persuades the world that he is a man of principle. Joseph Ziegler is gleefully on point as the rich relation who arrives incognito to adjudicate between the brothers (yes, the play has yet a third plotline). Brent Carver puts in a luxury appearance as an old retainer who is virtually the only person not to judge the Surfaces by their surfaces; and Monice Peter gives Maria, the statutory ingenue, more positive qualities than I would have thought possible.