FringeReview UK 2023

She Stoops to Conquer

Orange Tree Theatre

Genre: Classical and Shakespeare, Comedy, Costume, Drama, Live Music, Mainstream Theatre, Theatre

Venue: Orange Tree Theatre Richmond

Festival: FringeReview UK

Low Down

Review

Mistletoe drapes over the balconies of the Orange Tree in this 250^th anniversary production of Goldsmith’s She Stoops to Conquer, his 1773 warm and farcical antidote to sentiment, that somehow smuggles it back – along with just a scratch of class mobility, hypocrisy and subversion.

Directed by Artistic Director Tom Littler with Francesca Ellis, it mightn’t surprise anyone who knows Littler’s work (The Circle, say),  that this is set in the 1930s. Being Littler it’s ingenious and detailed, whilst language is subtly updated along with body language, and Tom Attwood’s stylish, exuberant Thirties dance band music. Anett Black’s and Neil Irish’s cosy drawing-room set and costumes (the travelling gear with goggles is masterly) involves use of everything from a cocktails trolley to a gramophone horn. And Jonathan Chan’s lighting in this robust comedy is paradoxically exquisite.

Out go most (not all) horse references and cars and tyres are brought in, for instance. Some things like gibbets and highwaymen can’t be excised but by the time of their appearance you don’t care.

Goldsmith’s plots don’t just end with beautifully-finished dialogue that make you mourn his early death. Every character sets up a contradiction that advances the plot, creates knots of confusion and in a twist unravels. Littler’s brilliance here advances to light brushes of caricature.

Thus a bashful young man stumbles over “sex” and “bosom” to bring the house down. But it’s only half his character. The other half responds frankly to sexuality, so long as it’s an inferior he can bed. How can Goldsmith make someone like that attractive?

It partly lies in the mechanism, and partly the sheer warmth of Goldsmith, investing generous even heart-stopping moments. Thus the peace of squire Mr Hardcastle (David Horovitch) and London-fancying Mrs Hardcastle (Greta Scacchi) is about to be shattered with the arrival of the son of an old friend Charles Marlow (senior) who might just make a match here. The bashful son who stumbles over “sex” indeed.

Horovitch is comfortable bluster itself, though with warm reasons and one who starts expostulating his confusions from the start: fashions, immodest young men, contriving daughters, his performance is like a massive throbbing vein you fear might explode.

Scacchi in sky-blue-orange garb is anything but the traditional Mrs Hardcastle; indeed her performance is deliciously outré. Yet there’s a core of love revealed, when she pleads with the supposed highwayman to take her life and not her son’s. Goldsmith’s portrayal of Mrs Hardcastle admits that, though it’s a rare actor who can convince you right through it’s what she’ll say. Scacchi makes you believe it in the moment.

Both Hardcastles have children from a previous marriage who paradoxically contradict their parents. Whilst Kate Hardcastle (Tanya Reynolds, who so impressed in A Mirror) rather enjoys fashion, if in a more sophisticated way than her stepmother, Mrs Hardcastle’s alehouse-entertainer son Tony Lumpkin (Guy Hughes) scorns fashion as much as Hardcastle.

Here Hughes is not at all the trad lumpish Lumpkin but dazzling, attractive, earthy and downright. Ingenious mischief shines from him: Hughes makes Tony wholly believable, immature enough short of his majority to enjoy pranks, but an adult in knowing where puckishness ends.

It’s Tony who piqued by Marlow and his friend asking directions to the Hardcastles, convinces them the Hardcastle’s Hall is an inn. Hughes’ playing of a ukulele, jumping on a table in the riotous Three Pigeon Inn scene (deft use of snow and other effects too at times) segues in with a touch of lighting: the one scene outside the drawing-room, with the aid of The Betterton Players, one of four ten-strong ensembles introducing a wholly different culture, where Tony feels at home.

Meanwhile Kate eagerly awaits her intended (or prospective) fiancé, Charles Marlow (Olivier-nominated Freddie Fox). Fox is outstanding. Not only does he embody the hypocrisy of a college-bred young man who’s tongue-tied with women of his class but can more than flirt with barmaids (placing him on a par with Tony who aspires no higher).

From his jerky aphasia through to his lusty-come-ons when addressing Kate as he sees her, a barmaid, Fox manages to make mannerisms charming and never chilled, a ballet of bashfulness and a tour-de-force of tongue-tied turnaround.

That’s because in a painful first interview Kate realises her new-met beau won’t proceed unless he mistakes her, as he then does, for a working-class barmaid.

Reynolds initially impresses with a languorous London-bred drawl and slinky silk number, almost unbelievable out of Mayfair, with a touch of time-travelling Fleabag in her asides to her friend Constance. You feel she must have had more than nodding acquaintance with Tony’s favourite barmaids to exhibit such downright dialect (Nick Trumble’s work). Reynolds can flip to sincerity beyond a surface archness, and in every way matches Fox.

Though I wonder at what point she should more gradually abandon that dialect when speaking finally as plain Kate, despite Goldsmith’s direction. This last scene reveal seems a touch too sudden, and the dissolve of dialect might have been teasingly introduced to point up the deception.

Then there’s the way Reynolds slinks about shamelessly hand-jobbing a gramophone horn that drives Fox’s Marlow mad with desire. The little kicks of exaggeration throughout from movement director Julia Cave are a mating dance with martinis.

Naturally there’s a second couple Kate’s friend Constance Neville (Sabrina Bartlett, who impressed here in While the Sun Shines) is niece to Mrs Hardcastle, who’s determined to keep her niece’s fortune by marrying her off to Tony: their mutual if amiable repulsion notwithstanding.

So Constance tries to steal her own impounded diamonds to elope with her beau, none other than Marlow’s friend George Hastings (Robert Mountford). Degrees of deception surround Marlow, convinced his father’s friend and daughter are innkeeper and drab, and here Bartlett shines as the more exuberant air-kisser, someone protesting high romance but ultimately not prepared to suffer for it.

Littler’s worked with Mountford in several Jermyn Street productions, most notably as Parolles in the miraculous 2019 All’s Well. That’s important for stripping the veneer of fop Hastings to reveal a man of foppish wit and sense, someone who deserves the ultimately common-sense Constance.

Diggory, latterly Sir Charles Marlow, (Richard Derrington) manages some blissful routines (Cave again) with  a variation of Victoria Wood’s Two Soups: here Two Rum Punches shaken not stirred over Diggory’s betters, as well as recalling the octogenarian waiter in One Man, Two Guvnors.

What proves so pivotal, the sudden stopping moment of absolute sincerity, is beautifully realised by Reynolds. That’s when still as a (now) poor cousin of the Hardcastles as the story changes and Marlow becomes more confused and respectful,  Kate simply states of fortune: “it puts me at a distance from one, that if I had a thousand pound I would give it all to.”

Reynolds delivers this with a small kick of sincerity that makes love still the comedy for a moment. Goldsmith’s sentiment is impeccable in other ways: It distinguishes Kate from Constance and has indeed conquered Marlow. The chemistry between Reynolds and Fox here is palpable.

Goldsmith guys any charges against him, even using self-parody, trailing “the whining end of a modern novel.” Littler’s team though reveal rare mettle and sincerity in a classic that can take some (if not all) updating. The 1930s must prove the very limits of belief in such class confusion, and there are tiny strains of sense.

But this production triumphs not just with the snap of a cracker, or (as here) the smash of Wedgwood. Littler has achieved the near miraculous: revealing the gleaming watchmaker’s plot in struts of exaggeration and polished saws; yet in those very details small shudders of heart that strike deeper than a period comedy. Outstanding.

Published November 23, 2023November 23, 2023 by Simon Jenner