‘…The quarrel is a very pretty quarrel as it stands; we should only spoil it by trying to explain it.’ So spake Sir Lucius O’Trigger in Act IV, Sc. 3. The intricate plot of the twenty-three-year old Sheridan’s 1775 comedy, as performed by the company Creative Cow on tour this weekend at the Rosemary Branch Theatre, however, requires little explanation. The play’s twelve roles were ‘doubled-up’ by the six cast members whose talent was such that they were able to metamorphose into another character in seconds, much to the delight of the audience.

Once a popular music hall where Charlie Chaplin is said to have performed, the Theatre’s aura of exclusive intimacy was present in its small space of a 6 by 5 metre stage and 65 seats. The lack of ‘backstage’ and wings was a great asset in that it served to treat the spectators to a professional performance in a comfortable setting. In Ancient Greek drama the set was simple and required no scene changes; Menander himself was reputedly the founder of the ‘comedy of manners’, an exposition of the behaviour of social classes on all levels – The Rivals belonging to that genre – so Creative Cow’s interpretation of this was pleasingly appropriate.

Set in Bath, the opening scene departed from the original text in that the entire cast was onstage during the dialogue between Thomas (Jonathan Parish), servant to Sir Anthony Absolute and Fag (Harvey Robinson), Captain Jack Absolute’s servant. Sitting in a line on white garden chairs and presumably ‘taking the waters’ at the Spa, they eavesdropped on the conversation with facial expressions of the utmost hilarity. Small touches like this provided a secret humour to a thespian version of an ad lib which Sheridan, like Handel, left plenty of room for. Lydia Languish (Lucy Theobald) is a seventeen-year-old girl with romantic notions of dispensing with her dowry and marrying for love. The poorer the suitor, the better. Captain Jack, being the son of Sir Anthony, knows he cannot win her heart in his own person, so ‘offstage’ he has been appearing to her in the guise of Ensign Beverley, an impoverished officer.

The scenes between Sir Anthony (Jack Hulland) and Mrs Malaprop (Katherine Senior) are electric. One favourite moment is when Sir Anthony is lulled to sleep by her talking and she awakens him by deftly snapping her fan in front of his face. Hulland plays his role with a certain degree of pomposity mixed with that of a debonair man-about-town with a son to marry off to Mrs Malaprop’s niece and is one of the most imposing actors on the stage; his presence is impossible to miss, achieving this, however, without stealing any thunder from the other actors. Senior’s Mrs Malaprop is performed with an alacrity akin to Jennifer Saunders’s Edwina in Absolutely Fabulous; though a younger actress, she played the part of a middle-aged lady considerably well. Her malapropisms where she substitutes one word for another by mistake are delightfully delivered. Mrs. Malaprop’s lines are now important ones to listen for when seeing this play, as ‘malapropism’ later became a word after Lord Byron used it in a linguistic sense in 1814. The form has appeared in drama for centuries before hand and thus were nothing new; they were also referred to as ‘Dogberryisms’, from Shakespeare’s character Dogberry doing the same thing in Much Ado About Nothing.

Jonathan Parish’s eloquent, gentlemanly, red-coated Captain Jack (‘the pineapple of politeness’, in Mrs Malaprop’s opinion) plays perfectly to Lucy Theobald’s affected and languishing young Lydia. With a suitable amount of hysteria, she invoked reaction and sympathy from the audience in spite of the character being deliberately the most irritating in the play – a feat difficult to do but Theobald’s acting style was successful in turning the spectators’ affections towards her. Comic scenes between Lydia and her maid Lucy (Kate Sharp) parodied and prodded at the romantic plays of the eighteenth-century, while minimal props – a basket of books – allowed for concentration on the characters, as did the ladies’ costumes, made by Alla Sellick. Clad in nothing but ‘underwear’ consisting of a white corset, white pantaloons and white hoop-skirt fashionable in the latter half of the eighteenth century, the only colour in all the female costumes were their fans in plain pastel lilac, mint and salmon. The exception was Kate Sparks, who when not playing Lydia’s cousin Julia, added a red mob-cap to her attire when in the role of Lucy. The ladies’ wigs were stupendous, as were those worn by the male actors. Crafted expertly from paper by actress Kate Sparks, the white curls might just as well have been made from stiffened, powdered hair rather than paper, staples and sticky-tape.

Scene changes were indicated by a very entertaining cotillion of chairs, whereby each actor took one of the pieces of furniture from underneath its seat, performing a perfectly choreographed movement in the form of a dance to appoint them to their respective places for the next piece. Scaffolding encased in Fairy-lights became a useful bower in which to overhear conversations and eject offsides to the audience. It was even a handy place upon which to sit. Bright lighting gave the air of a Bath townhouse or the outdoors while during closet conversations and soliloquies, one single lamp upon an actor gave a gentle glow of candlelight.

Sir Anthony informs his son Jack that he must marry well; the son refuses as he is already in love, causing a bitter rift between himself and his father. Similarly, Lydia enrages her aunt Malaprop by declaring her love only for ‘Beverley’. Jack later overhears Fag and Lucy gossiping and realises from this that the lady his father intends for him to marry, is, in fact, his own love: Lydia. Delighted by this, he makes a great show of reconciliation with his father, who says that he will call him ‘Jack’ again. However, will Lydia marry him when she discovers that he is not a penniless officer, thus upsetting her ideals of romance? He tells Lydia that he is only pretending to be Sir Anthony’s son, so for now, she still believes him to be Ensign Beverley. Another love-plot is woven into this tale; that of Jack’s friend Faulkland (Harvey Robinson) and Lucy. Robinson’s body language and accent changes are one of the heights of the play as the switch is so cleverly done, from an authoritative and sometimes brooding presence as Fag to the frenzied, fashionable fop in the form of Faulkland. The men’s costumes were fitting for the period yet had a ‘contemporary’ twist in the form of bold damask fabrics and lace cravats, like the avant-garde white underwear as worn by the women. Meanwhile, Jack is suffering from Lydia’s rejection of him now that she has discovered his identity.

Two other men are suitors to Lydia: the cheerful yet cowardly country squire Bob Acres (Jack Hulland), and an Irish dandy, Sir Lucius O’Trigger (Harvey Robinson). Both characters are again, indistinguishable from the actors’ previous rôles of a few minutes before: where Sir Anthony was choleric and rather frightening, Acres is buffoon-like and even loveable. This time, Robinson plays a different kind of fop from Falkland, who is often morose with somewhat affected mannerisms, in contrast to Sir Lucius’s excitable and over-exaggerated affectations. In keeping with the theme of rivals, the two actors try to out-do each other on stage; Sir Lucius lifts his foot on the chair, Acres copies, Lucius thumps his foot on the table; Acres cannot do it and this leaves the audience in fits. The eccentric coat of Sir Lucius is rather like an updated version of that of Joseph’s, and Acres, mainly in the garb of a country yokel, later appears in his finest: a vain peacock-blue jacket and white hair wildly parted in three tufts – one at the top and two at each side – in a style of which the great theatrical clown, Joseph Grimaldi, a contemporary of Sheridan’s, would be proud. Acres tells Sir Lucius that the impoverished ‘Beverley’ is courting his intended love and Sir Lucius advises that Acres must fight a duel with the officer. Interestingly, Sheridan, three years prior to this play in 1772, had fought a duel over the elopement with his young wife, Elizabeth Linley, and was badly wounded. Acres tells his friend Jack that he is to fight ‘Beverley’ and wants Jack as his ‘second’. Jack, of course, pleads absence but on the field, is keen to fight Sir Lucius, who has come to challenge Jack at the same time that Acres is to duel with ‘Beverley’.

The plot is eventually resolved after Acres’s servant David (Jonathan Parish) informs the other characters of the dangerous duel and they all rush to the field in time to prevent it. All is reconciled between Jack and Lydia, Faulkland and Julia. Sheridan’s first play was in fact rejected by the audience, who booed, hissed and threw apples rather than oranges. The author rewrote it and it was performed later that month, on 28th January 1775, to great acclaim. The Rivals had started as a ‘flop’ and finished as a favourite with the English Royal Family. In fact, in the manner of Mrs. Malaprop, it continues to be ‘the pineapple of perfection’, especially when performed by the Creative Cow Company.

The Rivals was performed by Creative Cow at the Rosemary Branch Theatre, running from 4th to 7th October 2012. It was directed by Amanda Knott and the lighting and stage management was by Darrell Bracegirdle.