I’ve been on a bit of a Bridgerton kick lately. I and the rest of the world, it seems, as the Regency romance has been doing gangbusters on Netflix analytics over the last few weeks. As modern audiences continue to salivate for Lady Whistledown’s accounts of torrid, “no we mustn’t” affairs (#Polin4Eva) and high society shade-throwing, it’s clear that our appetite for gossip hasn’t waned with the centuries. The School for Scandal certainly has all the elements you’d want in an 18th century comedy of manners; a young nouveau-riche wife tempted to stray by a dashing suitor; a benevolent uncle turning to disguise to test his nephews’ moral characters; a wine and women-loving rake with a heart of gold; and a chorus of gossips offering dubious commentary from the sidelines. In fact, part of the problem is that there may well be too many elements for the production to handle.
Scandal is written by Richard Sheridan, whom you may also know as the author of The Rivals. The plot, to the extent I can sum it up, follows Sir Peter Teazle (The Fresh Prince of Bel-Air’s Joseph Marcell), equally frustrated and delighted by his new young bride (Lydea Perkins), as they navigate the insidious circle of gossip orchestrated by society ringmaster Lady Sneerwell (Emily-Jane McNeill), here reimagined as a Louella Parsons-type gossip columnist. Lady Teazle, for her part, finds the gossip very diverting and Sir Peter a frightful bore, ultimately leading to an encounter in the drawing room of one Joseph Surface, which runs the risk of ruining her reputation forever.
Tilted Wig have transported Sheridan’s text to the 1950s with its aesthetic, although with its young gadabouts and fast-talking muckrakers, the overall effect has more of a Jeeves and Wooster-ish flavour. I will say everyone looks phenomenal, especially Lady Teazle’s slinky emerald number, Lady Sneerwell’s chic and severe two piece suit, and Sir Backbite’s candy-apple green blazer look. With an otherwise minimal set consisting of several sheets of peach curtains and some velvet couches, it has a pleasantly chocolate-box look to it that serves the light and frothy tone well (although the decision to have three rotary telephones on plinths throughout is a little baffling, given how infrequently they are used). But it never feels like we’ve moved anywhere, and the blocking throughout also leans towards the curiously static.
The programme mentions that, while The Rivals has gone on to become one of Britain’s best known comedies, that was only after substantial revisions following a very poor first run. Watching The School for Scandal, one can’t help but think this was another project where Sheridan was desperately in need of some restraint. School is a fitting analogy, because if your attention slips, you are getting left behind. There are way too many moving parts going on here, like if someone constructed a Rube-Goldberg machine from five different blueprints. New characters and intrigues are introduced so quickly they barely have time to register. Have I mentioned Sir Oliver, old friend of Sir Peter’s, returned from the Indies, who visits nephews Jack (courting Sir Peter’s ward Maria but pursued by Lady Teazle) and Charles (attached to Maria but rumoured to be involved with Lady Sneerwell), under two separate false identities? Did that sentence just exhaust you? Do you need an L-Word style diagram to explain all the connections? Me too!
I heard one audience member say as we got up to leave, “It got less confusing in the second half”, which I think is telling. You have to have your audience asking “What happens next?”, not “What’s going on?”, and at the rickety pace that Sheridan’s text moves, what should be important dynamics get left by the wayside. Ayesha Griffiths as Maria holds her own as a headstrong and morally upstanding young woman, but there really isn’t much to her character because Sheridan keeps darting back and forth too much for us to get invested. Her romance with Charles feels unearned because until the last scene we have only heard of their passions through hearsay and they have never shared a stage together. The aftermath of the titular ‘scandal’ really doesn’t amount to much beyond a rushed reconciliation and a few titters from the gossip’s gallery, who are simply too silly to come across as any kind of tangible threat. I fully forgot Lady Sneerwell’s sidekick Snake existed until he appears for the play’s denouement. At one point Lady Sneerwell remarks to Joseph that he should “stick to one roguery at a time” - I wish someone had told Sheridan the same thing.
But the script is also hampered by some very uneven direction. The tightrope between witty banter and broad comedy is a tough one to walk, and here it feels like everyone’s off balance. There are plenty of moments when the comedic stars perfectly aligned - a sequence where prodigal nephew Charles Service unknowingly sells off all but one of his family portraits to his uncle gets the rhythm just right; likewise the interplay between Joseph and Lady Teazle as they conceal their dalliance from Sir Peter. But other instances are just confounding - the moment immediately following Lady Teazle’s discovery is dragged out far longer than it needs to be, and each of the characters seems to be adopting a clashing approach to its staging - Lady Teazle stunned but still moving naturally, Sir Peter still and stony-faced in a moment of sincere heartbreak, and Joseph in a cartoonish freeze frame. Like the production as a whole, it feels like no one is working towards quite the same goal.
The night’s big get is of course Joseph Marcell, who plays Sir Peter with the kind of patrician restraint for which audiences love him (although interspersing it with odd bellows that feel a bit out-of-nowhere). He does it very well, but it’s often drowned out by some of the cast’s ’bigger’ choices. I say the gossip’s gallery is too silly to be threatening, but I’d be lying if I said I didn’t look forward to whenever they were onstage. For a play supposedly about gossip’s moral pitfalls, they didn’t half make you want to hang out with the gossipers. This is not least down to Garmon Rhys, who is doing the absolute most both in his dual roles as Lord Backbite and Charles Service. He is undoubtedly the most diverting to watch, indeed to the point of distraction, and there’s more than a touch of Rik Mayall both in Backbite’s mincing foppery and Charles’ Flashhearty taste for the good life. But he often goes so big that it disrupts the flow of the dialogue and muddles the tone - where the rest are doing farce, he is doing pantomime. For my money the best performance of the night belongs to Lydea Perkins as Lady Teazle - it would be so easy to portray this character as a materialistic ditz, but Perkins plays it in such a way that you can tell there’s a cunning behind the simper, and her ready retorts to Sir Peter prove she has wit in spades.
I used the term ‘chocolate box’ earlier, and I think that’s probably the most apt metaphor I can use for The School for Scandal. There are little, self-contained treats nestled in it, but they don’t always pair well together, and having them all in one go is probably a mistake.