The School for Scandal by Richard Brinsley Sheridan (review)

THE SCHOOL FOR SCANDAL Richard Brinsley Sheridan Directed by Jonathan Miller American Repertory Theatre (Boston) Arthur Holmberg Why not do The School for Scandal in modern dress? After all, tale bearers and backbiters are as willing today as in 1777 to tell everything they know and more about their best friends. Why not dress Sheridan's fools and fops in Norma Kamali or Giorgio Armani instead of polonaise and pelisse? Then as now, society lives on airs. "This play," contends Jonathan Miller, "is incomprehensible outside its period. It relates so specifically to Georgian London that it doesn't make sense otherwise. I don't understand the twentieth century's morbid fascination with itself. We occupy the suburbs of history. Relevancy is the most philistine word in English. Theatre is a means of reaching out to a time and place different from our own. Of course we'll never have an 'authentic' eighteenth century, but we can try to reconstitute it." These remarks may not seem so startling, but they led to a startling production of this comic gem. The eighteenth century Miller "reconstituted" did not look in any way, shape, or form like the mother-of-pearl century one usually sees staged (the Goncourt brothers called it "l'esthetique du jolie"). Miller set the play squarely in the London of Hogarth, not Gainsborough. When the lights went up, they uncovered Lady Sneerwell (played to shrewish perfection by Shirley Wilber) tucked away in her privy doing what nobody else could do for her. Then, only after the most arduous and ingenious maquillage-and a healthy swig or two of gin-was my lady braced to fare forth in society. Elegance cohabitated with squalor. Beneath the silk, putrid bodies; beneath the powder, the pox. This stench checked the play's drive towards sentimentality and revealed a ruthless cynicism in the sub-text often overlooked. 76 According to Miller, the traditional approach to Sheridan's text errs on two counts: country and social class. "Stage versions of the eighteenth century are nineteenth century vulgarizations of the French aristocracy on the verge of the revolution. This candy box image is a fabrication of ballet masters." The director's search for an authentic eighteenth century effected two major shifts in the physical appearance of the play. He used a muted, autumnal palette that cast a gentle melancholia over the high jinx (aniline dyes, which changed our sense of color, did not come in until the nineteenth century ), and he cleared the stage of the over-decorated, over-furnished, overupholstered set that slows the play down. Instead of painted and gilded rooms, there were wood-panelled interiors that created a rough, preindustrial texture. Archaeological theatre never looked so good. And what animals crouched in these habitats? Not the lords and ladies of Illyria, but a rambunctious merchant class on the make, stumbling into political and social power and striking an unholy alliance with the lesser nobility. Money, not romance, fuels the plot, and middle-class sentimentality stood revealed for the counterfeit coin it was and is. By situating the play slightly lower in the social scale than other productions, Miller cut loose the play's vis comica. Refined comedy of manners? Yes, but also rowdy farce. Miller played elegance off against the grotesque to the benefit of both. Sheridan peopled his stage with buffoons, not models of comportment. Miller's reading called into question the play's cozy domesticity. Just before the virtuous freeze into a final Raeburn group portrait, Lady Teazle sighs over her "rusty weather cock." How long, one wonders, will this highspirited young lass manage to remain true to her joyless prune of a husband ? And would one really care if she stepped out on him? Sheridan gave his middle-class audience what it paid to see, and then some. CL CL 77 The play separates the good (Sir Peter and company) from the evil (the gossip mongers). Lady Teazle, a binary intermediary, straddles both groups, and it's hard to tell where we like her best-saucy, pert, naughty with her friends; contrite, noble, domesticated at the end. Cherry Jones plays both parts so seductively, it's rather hard to choose, and...