"The School for Scandal". Oxford Playhouse

When Richard Brinsley Sheridan’s masterpiece, The School for Scandal, opened at Drury Lane Theatre in 1777, the sound of the audience laughing was so loud that passers-by in the street thought the building was falling over. William Hazlitt adored it, declaring, ‘Besides the wit and ingenuity of this play, there is a genial spirit of frankness and generosity about it, that relieves the heart as well as clears the lungs.’ Even as recently as 1995 one reviewer wrote that it is ‘such a superbly crafted laugh machine, and so timeless in delivering delectable comeuppance to a viper’s nest of idle-rich gossipmongers, that you’d practically have to club it to death to stifle its amazing pleasures’.

Tilted Wig’s touring production doesn’t club Sheridan to death, but neither does it breathe much life into this most joyous of satires. On the plus side, passers-by on Beaumont Street can wend their way home safe in the knowledge that the Oxford Playhouse isn’t about to fall over. On the minus side, the laughter from the audience is scattered, intermittent, and restricted mostly to little pockets of whooping fans who, I can only assume, must be friends of, or being paid by, the actors.

The programme really whets your appetite for this show. It’s formatted as a celebrity tittle-tattle magazine, with sections for Fashion, Features and Gossip, all of which bode well for an original interpretation, especially since the costume design eschews traditional Georgian outfits for stylish numbers from the 1950s. The set consists of three primary-coloured Bakelite retro phones on plinths, all promising a witty, updated take on the back-biting of 1777.

But, surprisingly for a theatre company that has already produced both Sheridan’s earlier hit The Rivals and Goldsmith’s She Stoops to Conquer, Tilted Wig’s production completely misses what makes this play so special: its warm-hearted joy at the fickle failings, back-biting and sexual misdemeanours of civilised society. The early film director of romantic comedies, Ernst Lubitsch, recognised this theme time and again, producing brilliantly funny plots with gallivanting husbands and secretly tempted wives, all underpinned by a contagiously positive faith in the natural goodness as well as the habitual depravity of human nature. Sheridan would have loved Lubitsch.

The tone-deafness comes in so many ways: in Garmon Rhys’s Charles going hideously over the top as the rake with a heart of gold, sounding more like a sub-Terry-Thomas rogue than a foppishly fun Hugh Grant; in Joseph Marcell’s Teazle struggling to be heard against the cacophony of the other characters; in the bland set offering no differentiation between Lady Sneerwell’s tea-party, Sir Peter Teazle’s parlour and Charles’s portrait gallery. The sheer sameness of each scene leaves the characters wading through a featureless, tedious wasteland. Most egregiously, the climactic comedy moment of the entire play – the revelation of Lady Teazle hiding behind a screen – falls not just flat but between two stools, as it is played partly for laughs and partly as a sudden, and utterly incongruous, moment of genuine marital despair. But Sheridan isn’t Shakespeare. He doesn’t pierce your heart with a moment triste even as the laughter reaches its peak. To pretend that he does is a disservice to the text, not a brilliant reinterpretation.

There are certainly scenes of hilarity and humanity in this production. After all, this is Sheridan, and in a battle of wits he is hard to beat. (This was a man who, on being criticised for drinking a glass of wine while watching his own theatre burn down, replied, ‘Zounds, a man may surely be allowed to take a glass of wine by his own fireside’. He found everything funny.) An early verbal joust between the Teazles is given welcome depth by them hugging each other while slipping in the verbal poignards. Smooching over exchanges like this - 

Lady T: I should think you would like to have your wife thought a woman of ‘Taste’.

Sir Peter: Taste! Zounds Madam you had no ‘Taste’ when you married me.

Lady T: That's very true indeed Sir Peter 

-          adds a flirty frisson of delectable insincerity. 

And there are even moments of meta-theatrical mirth, my favourite being Sir Oliver commenting in passing that it’s very ‘convenient for the plot that you all live so near one another’.

But for the most part, this production takes away more than it adds. The acting is mostly stylish and comedically calibrated. But it exists in a vacuum, starved of ‘business’, the lifeblood of theatrical comedy. When it has it, as in the portrait-selling set-piece, or the old hiding-in-the-closet routine, the show suddenly bursts into life. When it doesn’t, it instantly reverts to a bunch of people standing shouting at each other. The telephones are a perfect case in point. As the only pieces of set decoration in the entire play, and as universal symbols of covert conversation, they are sitting there, a mute gift waiting to be unwrapped. Imagine the fun that could be had if they were used by the various gossips like Lady Sneerwell and Benjamin Backbite, sharing confidences into the receiver. But no. The phones are employed exclusively as intercom devices for servants to inform the characters that visitors are on their way up. What a waste.

Sheridan’s original play finishes with a hilarious epilogue from Lady Teazle, bemoaning her future domestic life, in a parody of Othello’s death-speech. Tilted Wig jettison this in favour of a modern dance from the entire company – a final slap in the face to what makes School for Scandal special. Enough of the play survives for Sheridan to be the victor in the end, but his light, carefree world of duels, dancing-masters, duplicitous rakes and avaricious aristocrats feels a long way away from this heavy-handed treatment. It lacks the Lubitsch touch.