Theatre / 18th century
Preview: The School for Scandal
After their visceral, violent and hormonal Romeo and Juliet, Shakespeare at the Tobacco Factory wrap up their 2015 Bristol season with Richard Brinsley Sheridan’s dazzling eighteenth-century comedy – full of gossip, profligacy, discord and scheming.
“Sheridan is particularly famous for The School for Scandal and The Rivals,” director Andrew Hilton explains, “and this is the greater of the two, and certainly the more resonant in 2015. It’s full of colourful behaviour – cruel and fanciful gossip, youthful profligacy, marital discord and scheming – yet it never loses touch with the reality of late eighteenth century life, even at its most farcical.
“But most of all it is a play of dazzling verbal wit, which would not be matched until a later Irish playwright brought us The Importance of Being Earnest.”
Hilton notes that “the scandal-mongers of eighteenth-century London seem extraordinarily close to home”. What echoes are we talking here – Facebook, the Daily Mail, the permanently connected generation?
“Yes, all of those – and, of course, the recent High Court case involving Andy Coulson and Rebekah Brooks. Eighteenth-century London’s market for gossip – particularly of a defamatory kind – was small and local by current standards, but in its own way was as ruthless, inventive and damaging. It was also – certainly as Sheridan paints it – slightly unhinged, which makes it marvellously entertaining as well as shocking.”
A typically fine SATTF cast includes regulars Julia Hills, Benjamin Whitrow, Christopher Bianchi, Byron Mondahl (pictured) and Paul Currier – plus Paapa Essiedu, who impressed as the lead man in SATTF’s Romeo and Juliet.
The School for Scandal Thursday, April 9 to Saturday, May 9, Factory Theatre. For more info and to book tickets, visit www.tobaccofactorytheatres.com/shows/detail/the_school_for_scandal
Pic: Farrows Creative
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