4/5 Damn the cold and blasted weather! Liven your spirits with this week’s fantastically indulgent romp down at the Oxford Playhouse. Sheridan’s eighteenth Century Restoration Comedy is brought forward to the decadent, post-war scene of the 1920s. Admittedly, the production is steeped in so much stereotype (complete with women flopping their wrists, clutching tumblers of slow gin, and listening to scratchy gramophone records) you half expect a fast-talking character, wearing a pinstripe suit and spanking new spats, to waltz on. But, it is precisely all this cliché that gives Chanya Button’s version such resonance: the overtly superficial style only helps to emphasise the shallow nature of the characters.Teetering on the brink of exhaustive melodrama, the actors do a tremendous job of giving poised performances, while still enjoying Sheridan’s exaggerated characterisation. With the spoiled naivety of Lydia (Charlotte Bayley) and hopeless sincerity of Julia (Emma Pearce), wonderfully paralleled by the dapper Jack Absolute (Patrick Netherton) and nervously obsessive Faulkland (Tom Palmer), there is a predictably turbulent four-way love game between the younger characters. Meanwhile, the famous Mrs. Malaprop (played by a boisterous Natasha Kirk) verbally stumbles through the play, flirting with both Sir Anthony Absolute (Matt Lacey) and Sir Lucius O Trigger (Shaun Passey). Unbeknown to these upper class knit-wits, are the conniving methods of the secretly omniscient maid of Mrs. Malaprop, Lucy (Cecily Motley), and Jack Absolute’s butler, Fag (Leo-Marcus Wan). Finally, a chaotic farce of love and misunderstanding would not be complete without the pitiable everyman with whom the audience regretfully must identify, pottering awkwardly around in the form of Acres (Peter Clapp).Such an able set of cast members, all playing strongly-defined characters, risk battling each other for the lime light. None, however, are guilty of such a fault. Every characteristic, from the acute to the explicit – from the clammy smugness of Fag to the unscrupulous disorder of Mrs. Malaprop’s speech – is brought to the fore. The biggest laughs seem to be raised by Kirk’s wonderfully delivered malapropisms, including phrases such as “anticipate the past” or “explode the matter”, but the other performances are too slick for her to steal the show.Indeed, ‘slick’ is the production’s definition, save the rather clumsy scene changes (during which we see a single character in the spot light, ironically looking uncomfortable as the black-shirted stage hands scuffle about the darkened stage). Things would have also been helped by a shorter running time, as the fast-paced nature of the setting somewhat jars with Sheridan’s exposition-heavy script: rather than speed it up, it merely proves to expose it for all its slow indulgence. Don’t count on having a last drink at the pub, but prepare to be carried away by completely hackneyed tomfoolery. You’ll be yearning to conjure up a swing band and let that muted trumpet blow your winter blues away! 2:30pm Sat
7:30pm Thurs/Sat
8:00pm Friday
Oxford Playhouse: Run ends on Saturday January 26thReview by Frankie Parham
The Rivals
