Theatre review: Scandaltown

All of a sudden we're getting to see everything Mike Bartlett kept himself busy with during lockdown, with his second premiere in the space of a week. I hadn't quite registered that I'd booked them two days apart from each other, but they do show a contrast in a playwright who likes to experiment with style, and has grown fond in recent years of using familiar classic theatrical genres to reflect on the present day. So if The 47th was a tragicomedy so dark it bordered on the apocalyptic, Scandaltown, opening at the Lyric Hammersmith in a production by Rachel O'Riordan, goes for much less ambiguous laughs, applying the convoluted plots and stock characters of Restoration comedy to 21st century concerns. Phoebe Virtue (Cecilia Appiah) and her twin brother were raised in the country, and are considerate, environmentally conscious and unselfish.

At least they used to be, but ever since Jack (Matthew Broome) moved to London, Phoebe's become concerned that he's moved on to a life of drugs and depravity so, disguising herself as a boy, she takes the spare room in the house Jack shares with Freddie Peripheral (Luke Hornsby) and Jenny Hood (Ami Okumura Jones.)

Elsewhere, fading reality star Lady Susan Climber (Rachael Stirling) has hired social media consultant Hannah Tweetwell (Aysha Kala) to boost her image, and has soon been set up as a potential mistress for married Tory MP Matt Eton (Richard Goulding, the King Charles III alumni having been shared out fairly between Bartlett's new shows.) The plan is for Lady Climber to be rebranded as a right-wing provocateur, but little does she know that Hannah harbours a grudge and is secretly sabotaging her.

Of course, if the subject of the pastiche is this time Restoration comedy, Bartlett wouldn't have done his job right if the plot could be summarised and make much sense; instead it's a Byzantine tangle of long-lost families, sex and miscommunication that serves as an excuse for a lot of broad comedy. At the centre of the story is a masked ball where half the guests seem to have turned up in the same two costumes, meaning all the planned assignations end up with everyone hooking up with the wrong person; and, with a suitably 2022 sexual fluidity, discovering that they might actually like it better that way.

Scandaltown is a slighter, more disposable play than most of Bartlett's work, and is clearly designed as such: Given the amount of unimpressive ones I've seen I'm often saying Restoration comedy is much harder to do than people seem to imagine; unless you fully Swale it up and wring every drop of the camp and bizarre out of it, you can end up with a relentless monotone of in-jokes from 2-4 centuries ago, and then everyone falls over. So this is perhaps a chance to see how those plays were meant to be received at the time, with the target being the competing attitudes and factions that fill both traditional and social media.

Left and Right both get a skewering, although one inevitably more gently than the other: Freddie's sudden rant about Partygate is topical and justifiable, but the angry note it strikes does jar in a story that otherwise prefers to go for affectionate mockery rather than for the jugular. And for the most part the play provides a steady stream of silly but very funny gags. The cast look like they're having a whale of a time; Stirling brings Lady Climber an elegance and pomposity that make it all the funnier when she accidentally deflowers earnest wannabe filmmaker Tom Double-Budget (Thomas Josling,) and she later has a fun running joke when she conceals under a big coat an outfit so shocking the audience aren't allowed to see it.

The set by Good Teeth and costumes by Kinnetia Isidore keep up the heightened artificiality, as do the performances, which might not be to everyone's taste - Vanessa hasn't seen much Restoration theatre, so a couple of the more stylised, mannered performances annoyed her (but she did love Lady Climber constantly ending up in the same pose as her portrait.) Despite the topical themes Scandaltown isn't a particularly deep and biting critique of the world in 2022 but an opportunity to laugh for a couple of hours and forget about the worst parts of it, and on that score it succeeds as a silly, sexy romp.

Scandaltown by Mike Bartlett is booking until the 14th of May at the Lyric Hammersmith.

Running time: 2 hours 40 minutes including interval.

Photo credit: Marc Brenner.