She Stoops to Conquer: a sublime staging of an evergreen Restoration comedy
In the topsy-turvy way of these things, the Orange Tree in Richmond, which lost its regular Arts Council funding in 2014, is one of the few venues in London that invaluably revives classics to a high standard, ensuring that the “repertoire”, as was, doesn’t wholly fall into neglect.
Last Christmas saw a superlative revival of Bernard Shaw’s Arms and the Man (1894), directed by the departing artistic director Paul Miller. His successor, Tom Littler, offered the swift reassurance, in May, of an exemplary account of Somerset Maugham’s The Circle (1921) – so good, it will tour next year. Now, Littler offers up a gloriously funny, Yuletide-set staging of She Stoops to Conquer, splendidly cast and perfectly played.
Oliver Goldsmith’s country-house comedy returns sufficiently often for it to seem imperishable. But given that it premiered in 1773, and that its language might be deemed inaccessibly complex, its recurrence can’t be taken for granted. What’s manifest, though, is Littler’s confidence in the work’s ability to speak to us today, despite its period and plot-heaviness. Despite shifting the action to the 1930s, involving a few textual tweaks, he tells us: “99 per cent of the time, the words spoken are Goldsmiths”.
And they flow from the cast with the bubbling gaiety of a stream in sunlight, at full torrent. “I love everything that’s old; old friends, old times, old manners, old books, old wine...” harrumphs David Horovitch’s stick in the mud Mr Hardcastle at the start to his restless, would-be modish second wife – Greta Scacchi’s Dorothy, a winning study in affected airs and would-be youthful graces. She dotes on her wastrel son by her first marriage, Tony (Guy Hughes), an amiable oaf who seizes on a chance to gull two visiting Londoners – Marlow and Hastings, furtive suitors to the daughter (Kate) and niece (Constance), respectively, of Mr and Mrs H – into mistaking the rustic Hardcastle residence for an inn.
This generates a comedy of misunderstanding at the expense of the entitled, unwitting arrivals, and their baffled but reluctantly obliging curmudgeon-host, with Freddie Fox’s foppish Marlow leading the charge of snorting condescension. The entertainment is augmented by further contrivance, but the underlying indictment of human nature is simple: once people get an idea into their heads it’s very difficult to dislodge it.
Hence, most ludicrously, the fifth act sees Tony persuade his terrified mater that they’ve travelled into the rural wilds, when they’ve only come full circle to the garden. But, most piquantly, it sees Fox’s split-personality hero switch between neurotic shyness before young women of his own class, but adopt a seigneurial swagger when making moves on “the lower orders” – a psychological challenge that Tanya Reynolds’s brightly amused Kate rises, or rather stoops – to resolve by assuming the persona of a pert wench.
The genius of the piece is that it makes us apprehend society as a form of theatre (hereafter comes Wilde) and also glean that the greatest impediment to individual self-realisation often lies within (hereafter, too, comes Dickens’s Scrooge). All this is written in laughter. Food for thought for Christmas, then, but a gift for life, too.
Until Jan 13. Tickets: 020 8940 3633; orangetreetheatre.co.uk
