The Fantastic Follies of Mrs Rich

Playwright: Mary Pix Director: Jo Davies Swan Theatre, Waterside, Stratford-upon-avon (01789-403493). Until 14 June Running time: 2hrs 40mins (including interval)

This sparkling Restoration comedy, originally named The Beau Defeated, was written in 1700 by Mary Pix, a name now unjustly forgotten, said Ann Treneman in The Times. Hearty congratulations are due to the RSC for excavating her “hoot” of a play and glamming it up “with endless frou-frou and fripperies”. The main plot concerns the machinations of a wealthy widow, Mrs Rich, as she schemes to marry her way into the aristocracy. The bubbling themes are (of course) status, power, money and sex – and the stage “buzzes with entrances and exits” from a host of characters all hovering amusingly on the brink of unbelievable. There are also three or four subplots swirling around, making Mrs Rich a “heady combo of Legally Blonde, Keeping Up with the

Kardashians and Blackadder”. In my view this does not amount to the rediscovery of a hidden classic, said Michael Billington in The Guardian. The plotting is “wayward” and the dialogue lacks the “verbal felicity” of the great Restoration wits. Yet director Jo Davies and her alchemical team have turned a “pretty average play into theatrical gold”, by means of a scintillating production full of invention. Grant Olding has written a series of “beguiling songs”, backed by four saxophones and sung mostly by Mrs Rich, who is brought joyously to life by Sophie Stanton in “full period fig”. And Colin Richmond’s “ravishing, painterly backdrops” make clear exactly where each scene is set.

Stanton is “magnificently foolish” as the would-be duchess, said Jane Edwardes in The Sunday Times. She “puckers her lips and arches her eyebrows” like a Restoration pantomime dame. In a strong cast, another stand-out is Sadie Shimmin as a “dotty, drunken landlady”. Tam Williams portrays the defeated beau (of the original title) with the requisite idiotic foppishness, said Dominic Cavendish in the Daily Telegraph. Two gorgeous lurchers nearly steal the show, and there’s even an Act V woman-on-woman sword fight involving pantaloons and feather dusters. “Now when did you last see that at the RSC?”