And so to the Southwark Playhouse to see 'The Rivals', for the first time in 10 years. It wasn't a theatre I'd been to before, and the production would have passed me by (and, paradoxically, not sold out as quickly and been an awful lot easier to get tickets for) had not Monsieur Billington of the good ship Guardian reviewed it. Now, after trawling the other reviews a bit (the Times was an awful lot sniffier), and seeing the £18 price tag, I was in two minds as to whether to go. However, it's a play that's not on often - indeed, the RSC revival in 2000 that Billington mentions was the only other time I've seen it, which makes me feel positively ancient - and it sounded a decent cast, so I decided to go along. Ending up on a returns list (of two - the £18 price must be offputting, it nearly was for me), I get a ticket at the last second, dash into the auditorium just after the actors and plonk down in the reserved 'latecomers' spots at extreme left of the single frontal seating tier.
A very good production, for what it was, a professional but shoestring production under cover under a railway arch, with mainline London Bridge services rattling overhead - excellent cast, comic timing and a level of audience interaction that should enliven more productions of 18th century plays. A slightly too simpering Lydia perhaps - that of course needs to be part of the interpretation of that romantic-novel-obsessed character, but it also needs something more (just as, say, an Olivia in Twelfth Night needs both silk and steel). And the sightlines for those on the wings were tricky at times, with both characters blocking each other - but then they always are, and it's no criticism of this production to say that comparing it with a half-remembered RSC one with a proscenium arch at the Barbican or the good old / bad old Royal Shakespeare Theatre is hardly comparing like with like.
Talking of half-remembered, it's strange what strikes you in a play seeing it at two such different times of life and in two such different productions. In the RSC one (pictured), only five years into my theatre-viewing life, and with a cast including Wendy Craig and Benjamin Whitrow (Fowler from Chicken Run if animation or film is more your metier), it was one of my early experiences of professional comic timing, how to ride a laugh, turn on a sixpence from belly laugh to pathos, and so on - and the second time I saw a little-known young Scottish classical actor called David who seems to have gone on to do something big in sci-fi. Not that these things were absent last night - but in addition two other things struck me.
First, now that I work at a military museum, I was struck by the as-standard 'upper class rural yokel' character Bob Acres' repeated references to the Somerset militia, the 18th century's Dad's Army. The play came out in 1775, the year the Americans began their fight for independence, with the Franco-Spanish invasion threats of the Seven Years' War well within Britain's living memory and new ones soon to come. And yet the RSC production was, in its way, much more militarised - not only Jack Absolute was in military uniform (which is in the text) but also his blustering father Anthony (which is not). Which not only proves you always come to a play with a different set of expectations, but also makes you wonder if it could perhaps be played in a militarised 20th century era, perhaps on the British home front during one of the World Wars - though it would take a daring director to break it out of its frock coats and frilly dresses.
Secondly, the Shakespearean overtones. Some of these were down to the production itself - it was a very musical one, with Faulkland wilting like some comedy version of Orsino whilst being sung an 18th-century-aria-like version of 'Come Away Death' from Twelfth Night (admittedly something I wouldn't have noticed had I not been in an amateur Twelfth Night recently). But they're also there in the text - at least four quotes from Hamlet if I counted correctly, again mostly in Acres' mouth.
On past form, return in 2020 for the next time I see the play....
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