WE all like a good gossip, don’t we? And these days there is more than enough scandal available in all those celebrity magazines – not so much the Tatler as the Tittle Tattle.
This obsession with other people’s private lives is nothing new. Sheridan’s play, first produced in 1777, consists of much bitching, backbiting and scandal-mongering.
Clancy McMullan’s production for Upstart Theatre repositions the play in the early 1960s in a club in London’s Soho. The play sits perfectly in this setting, as comfortably as Lady Sneerwell (Rachel Alexander-Hill, disdainful and scheming) does in her comfy armchair centre stage in the Barton Club.
From here, sipping cocktails and smoking cigarettes, she orchestrates the comings and goings of society, exposing and manipulating the affairs and schemes of those around her.
At the heart of all this disreputable behaviour is wealthy bachelor Sir Peter Teazle, whose marriage to a country squire’s daughter has aroused a certain amount of comment, not all of it kind.
The story is less important than the tongue-lashings delivered by cliques such as those manoeuvred by Lady Sneerwell. This is just as well, because it is not terribly easy to follow with so many characters (15) and so much plot. At twoand- a-half hours plus interval, there were times I longed for the players to pick up the pace.
Lady Sneerwell is such a divinely horrible woman that I rather pined when she went missing for long periods. But Ian Giles’ Sir Peter Teazle and Daniel Wilmot’s Joseph Surface certainly held the attention.
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