22 JANUARY 1983, Page 28

Theatre

Alas, a lack

Giles Gordon

The School for Scandal (Theatre Royal, Haymarket)

Mr Cinders (King's Head) T ast night Lord L', confided Dulcie Gray's over-painted Lady Sneerwell in the prologue to The School for Scandal, `was caught with Lady D.' Later Lord L is, indeed, revealed as Lucan, which may sug- gest there are more things in heaven and earth, Horatio, than are dreamt of in your philosophy. The play was first performed in 1777. The line, though, was written not by Sheridan the playwright but by Garrick the actor-manager. That it didn't get a laugh was less to do with the pinched vowels and squeaking sounds of Mrs Denison's perfor- mance than of what seemed to be a lack of commitment to the play which permeated the evening. (Mr Denison was, of course, also in the cast. The tall and deep-throated actor was, at least four times, described as In fact much was wrong with the detail of John Barton's production, starting with the banishment of the Haymarket's glorious curtain. Christopher Morley's tacky sets (neither of the doors on stage remained shut after entrances and exits had been effected) and costumes were reminiscent of, respec- tively, sales time at a once well-known Tot- tenham Court Road furniture store and a too-long stay at the National Portrait Gallery. No one in the last two decades has influenced the look of British stage produc- tions more effectively than Mr Morley, or designed more brilliantly than himself. Remember the silver dazzle of The Revenger's Tragedy, the exquisite style and invention of The Relapse. No one has done more for the clear and sensible presentation of Shakespeare during the same period than Mr Barton. Why directors, designers and actors of the calibre involved here seem consistently to fail nowadays by their own highest standards when working outside the

subsidised sector is an issue too complex and perhaps polemical to raise in a review. Suffice it to say that the worthy Triumph Apollo Productions have, in their efforts to become the new H.M. Tennent, proved once more that there is no substitute for the sus- tained quality of work regularly achieved by the national companies.

The School for Scandal is not Restora- tion comedy. The only china observed is that from which chocolate is sipped, and a saucer smashed in pique by a minor character. It has little to do with Eros, be- ing unexpectedly genteel and bourgeois. Goldsmith's much more mature She Stoops to Conquer was first performed four years before the premiere of Sheridan's play. Sheridan, however, was clearly more in thrall to Congreve, Wycherley, Vanbrugh and the rest and intended to write a satirical comedy of contemporary manners which combined the high style of the Restoration with a confident understanding of the human heart and psyche. The play, surely over-rated, is broken-backed, the first two acts requiring the gloss and sophistication of the RSC to lend them excitement in pro- duction, the last three needing the sceptical eye of a William Gaskill (his last year's She Stoops to Conquer was just right) or a Jonathan Miller, whose version at the Old Vic a decade ago communicated the seediness and disreputableness of Hogarth's London.

Beryl Reid as Mrs Candour can't make up her mind whether she's in charge of a sub- post office or is Margaret Rutherford, let alone Edith Evans. Bill Owen, looking like Lord Goodman and sounding like Miles Malleson, gives a lovely performance as a superior servant. Gordon Gostelow and Patrick Godfrey turn in memorable character studies. Donald Sinden as the elderly Sir Peter Teazle — a very theatre print, definitely tuppence coloured — gives his best performance in years. He doesn't, as sometimes, go over the top, and if he speaks many of his lines direct to the au- dience it's because he's learnt to distrust most of the play's characters.

Mr Sinden (surely next year's theatrical knight?) is at his best playing chaps who ap- pear dogmatic, self-confident, inflexible and yet who can be — as he is here — smit- ten by that disease called love. To witness his stillness when he's sunk slowly to a chair after a screen has been thrown down, revealing not the promised French milliner but the lovely Lady Teazle and in another man's room, is to observe his very identity being drained away as the full implication of what has happened lodges in his mind and is then conveyed to his sagging body.

Mr Cinders, a musical that doesn't pur- port to significance, ran in the West End for two years from 1929, and when — as it must — the present wonderfully fresh and innocent version is transferred there it will show up the pretensions of certain other ex- amples of the genre. There's more social comment here than in, say, Evita, because Clifford Grey and Greatrex Newman, who wrote it, were clearly interested in human

beings and their antics. The piano playing of Vivian Ellis's and Richard Meyers's music is delightfully done, and the songs will long outlive Sting's current rendering of one of them, 'Spread a Little Happiness'. Here it is sung by Denis Lawson as Jim, the impoverished relation of two unpleasant, blazered young men out to marry money. Mr Lawson, who must within a year or two be taken up in a big way both as singer and comic-actor, is helped — as is the entire cast — by the lack of microphones. The plot whisks along, and Cinderella's slipper is replaced by a hat: he whose head it fits will marry the American millionaire's daughter. Which is as well, as Jill and Jim are already in love.