The School for Scandal

Much of Richard Brinsley Sheridan’s The School for Scandal (1777) is about surface as opposed to sentiment, so it is not surprising that the Royal Shakespeare Company (RSC) emphasized surface in its staging. Most characters were hard-edged in their presentation, both in their dress and in their diction, the latter being superb throughout. The frequent use of lifts to bring characters on and off accentuated the artificiality of the staging. All this heightened the contrast between the scandalmongers, teachers, and pupils—Lady Sneerwell, Snake, Lady Teazle, Sir Benjamin Backbite, and others—and the solid citizens Sir Peter Teazle, Rowley, and, arguably, Sir Oliver Surface. The dress of the last three was more sober and their entrances more conventional. Charles Surface and his drunken entourage fell somewhere in between: their clothes echoed the shocking pink that was the dominant color worn by the scandalmongers but were looser and flimsier, especially the garment worn by Charles, which resembled, oddly, an attenuated toga (fig. 1).The use of pink and the blending in the costumes of a contemporary aesthetic, or at least one as interpreted by the performers at Glastonbury, with that of the later eighteenth century have been mentioned by other reviewers and were highlighted in the program notes. The set was minimalist, heightening the impact of the costumes. As with the costumes, the music blended the eighteenth century with the contemporary. This partial modernization was echoed occasionally in the text. There were some witty updatings of the prologue and epilogue and a running joke around the origin of the fortune of Sir Oliver Surface, the uncle of Charles and Joseph, who had been an East Indies merchant. The joke was that a circumlocution was employed whenever the subject was mentioned. It is interesting because the effect, presumably intended, was not a “woke” condemnation of how Sir Oliver made his fortune but rather a humorous emphasis on it together with a mild register of disapproval.In the end, the modernization of costume and music and, occasionally, of text seemed to me to be relatively unimportant, while the sparseness of the set was not so different from the practice of Sheridan’s day and perhaps heightened the comedy at times, for instance, in the famous screen scene. Maybe blending old and new accentuated the play’s appeal to younger audience members less used to seeing actors in eighteenth-century clothes and wigs. Plenty of these were evident in the production but in a caricatured fashion. Equally, some audience members may have disliked the adjustments, but those adjustments did not depart significantly from the spirit of the original.Costume and music were relatively unimportant because, in spite of the elements of visual farce in The School for Scandal, the most important thing is the text and how it is delivered. Here, the superb diction helped. (Since many of the cast members were youthful, the clarity of the diction was a welcome rebuttal of the proposition that young actors in the United Kingdom cannot articulate clearly.) Outstanding among the general excellence of the acting was that of Stefan Adegbola as Joseph Surface.If there is a central character in the play, it is Joseph since much of the plot hinges on his falsity. He poses as a man of sentiment, but this is partly to deceive his former guardian, Sir Peter Teazle, and hence Sir Peter’s friend Sir Oliver, now returning after making his fortune. Joseph’s motive is to become Sir Oliver’s heir. And he wishes to marry the wealthy and virtuous Maria. She prefers Charles Surface, carouser though he is, and Joseph allies himself with Lady Sneerwell in order to change Maria’s mind—Lady Sneerwell’s motive being her own desire for Charles. Snake’s forged letters and other machinations are to be the instruments.Central though his character is, Joseph Surface is difficult to play in a comedy because much of what he says is not obviously comic, unlike the ludicrous gossip of the scandalmongers. Nevertheless, Adegbola brilliantly turned the dialogue of his hypocritical character into comedy, with just the right degree of sententiousness and just the right emphasis on the sentimental epigrams that are Joseph’s stock in trade. The epigrams became another running joke as the play developed. Interestingly, the importance of casting the right actor for Joseph was recognized in the original production of 1777, which was, of course, an outstanding success (the actor then was Jack Palmer). Later, Joseph Surfaces have included John Gielgud (in two separate productions) and Peter Cushing.Picking out other individual actors smacks of inequity, so uniformly good was the acting, but I will mention Wil Johnson and Geoffrey Streatfeild, playing the more sober roles of Sir Oliver and Sir Peter, respectively. As with Joseph, laughs were a little harder to come by in these roles, but they were still marvelously successful. Sir Oliver, too, had to inject pathos when he impersonated Stanley, an aged pauper, in order to test Joseph’s and Charles’s generosity (Charles wins, of course) and equally when he impersonated Premium, a broker and moneylender, to whom Charles refused to sell the portrait of Sir Oliver as a younger man, though willing to sell all the other family portraits. The pathos lies in Sir Oliver’s gratitude at his unwitting nephew’s generosity of spirit. Also successfully bringing off a transition—in her case from light-minded extravagance and a pupillage in scandalmongering to affectionate acceptance of her husband’s virtues—was Tara Tijani as Lady Teazle. A mention is called for as well of Jason Thorpe as Crabtree, one of the scandalmongers, whose exchange with his nephew, Sir Benjamin Backbite (Patrick Walshe McBride), as they elaborate a wholly imaginary duel between Sir Peter and Charles was a comic masterpiece.There is, of course, the problem of anti-Semitism in the play, embodied in the person of Moses the moneylender, who introduces Charles to the fictitious Premium. Sheridan emphasizes that Moses has done his best to bring Charles Surface to his senses, but he cannot resist some casually anti-Semitic jokes. This production neatly sidestepped the problem by turning Moses into Mrs. Morehouse (Shazia Nicholls). Women engaged in many trades in the eighteenth century, so the transformation could be seen as a blow for women’s equality, especially as in the play women are far outnumbered by men.The production was as slick as one has come to expect from the RSC. This and the hard-edged presentation of some characters raise the question—a perennial one with Sheridan—of whether the society portrayed is all surface or whether there is some real underlying sentiment. I myself, at one with Penelope Corfield in being an optimist about eighteenth-century Britain, felt that, in Sir Oliver’s pleasure at Charles’s underlying generosity, Charles and Maria’s love for each other, and the Teazles’ reconciliation, there was real sentiment, and this production brought it out effectively.