Theatre review: The School for Scandal

Continuing the new RSC artistic team's unpredictable approach to an opening season we have a rare main stage outing for Restoration Comedy, that genre made up of such a tangle of mini-plots it always defeats my attempts to provide anything like a coherent synopsis. But it's probably accurate enough to say the main focus of all the shenanigans in Richard Brinsley Sheridan's The School for Scandal is a pair of brothers, young adults but still theoretically being kept an eye on by family friend Sir Peter Teazle (Geoffrey Streatfeild) since their father's death: Charles Surface (John Leader) is the party-animal youngest, who's already got through his share of the inheritance and has sold off half the contents of his house. But a lot of his financial mismanagement comes from his generosity to friends and strangers alike, and he's essentially kind-hearted - something his public image doesn't really reflect.

This bad-boy image suits his elder brother Joseph (Stefan Adegbola,) who's best known for publicly spouting pious, largely meaningless epigrams, which come with their own burst of angelic choral music to drive the point home.

In reality he's a schemer who plans to marry Maria (Yasemin Ӧzdemir) for her money, while also seducing Sir Peter's new young wife Lady Teazle (Tara Tijani.) He's all too happy for Charles to be suspected of all this in his place, and spreads his brother's bad name with the help of the titular School for Scandal: A nickname for the gossip circle led by Lady Sneerwell (Siubhan Harrison,) who in the absence of any new gossip to collect is happy to make up her own.

She surrounds herself with the likes of Mrs Candour (Emily Houghton,) who likes to express her distaste at the sort of people who would spread stories like the ones she's about to laboriously list; and Backbite (Patrick Walshe McBride,) a poet whose work somehow hasn't found a publisher yet, consisting as it does entirely of bitching. What none of the gossips has found out about yet is that the Surfaces' uncle Sir Oliver (Wil Johnson) is back in town, and as the brothers' fortunes rely on his eventual inheritance, his discovering their real personalities could scupper the School's plans.

I hope director Tinuke Craig was 100% sure when she asked for a pink theme because PINK! and then some is what designer Alex Lowde has delivered with a fuschia catwalk for a stage and - with the exception of a couple of characters in sombre black in the hope they'll be taken seriously - various shades of pink for all the costumes. I guess there's something about Restoration outfits that's drag-adjacent anyway, and what with the protagonists spilling tea and reading each other to filth it's a natural enough step to nudge the aesthetic in that direction. Nowhere more so than when we see Charles' house and the androgynous fashions he surrounds himself with - Omar Bynon looks like he's had to go through a fairly painful amount of waxing to pull off his sidekick Careless' bare-chested corset ensemble.

Restoration Comedy is usually so topical a bit of updating is called for, and here it's smoothly done - problematic elements of the story are regularly dealt with by the characters insisting there's definitely nothing unethical to look into more closely regarding how Sir Oliver made his fortune in the East India Company. There's a touch of the Gossip Girl / Lady Whistledown to the way Tadeo Martinez' Snake spreads forged love letters to and from Charles, and when Jessica Alade's put-upon servant Lappet finally snaps I suspect the language used is a bit less than 100% authentic Sheridan.

Although enduring in popularity this is a style of comedy that can be massively hit-and-miss to revive, and while Craig's production doesn't have them rolling in the aisles there's a decent amount of laughs, and I smiled my way through most of the afternoon. Given it's a story that involves the spreading of fake news some directors could have been a lot more heavy-handed about contemporary parallels, but Craig's happy to let Sheridan's original digs to the audience find their target: We might condemn the gossip, but that's what we came here to see, isn't it?

The School for Scandal by Richard Brinsley Sheridan is booking in repertory until the 6th of September at the Royal Shakespeare Theatre, Stratford-upon-Avon.

Running time: 2 hours 50 minutes including interval.

Photo credit: Marc Brenner.