The Rivals

by Richard Brinsley Sheridan

seen at the Orange Tree Theatre Richmond on 8 December 2025

Tom Littler directs a revival of Sheridan's first really successful play to celebrate its 250th anniversary, re-setting it in the Wodehousian world of the 1920s, "about as modern as you can go," he says in a programme note, "before the plot makes no sense". (In any period it stretches the bounds of credulity, but that is partly its point.)

Kit Young plays Captain Jack Absolute, who has disguised himself as Sergeant Beverley to win the affections of Lydia Languish (Zoe Brough), a girl lost in dreams of romantic poverty inspired by reading sentimental novels. Their liaison has been discovered and forbidden by Lydia's aunt Mrs Malaprop (a wonderful Patricia Hodge, managing the lady's hilarious mangling of language with unerring dexterity). 

All very predictable, but the comedy intensifies when Mrs Malaprop and Jack's father Sir Anthony (Robert Bathurst) agree that Jack should marry Lydia (essentially for her fortune, so far as Sir Anthony is concerned). Jack at first refuses his father's overbearing pressure to marry under instruction, until he discovers who the intended bride is, and then he must juggle being Beverley and Jack to try to keep everyone happy, knowing that Lydia will not be impressed at being forced to marry a captain. Subplots abound, involving Lydia's cousin and Jack's friends, and Mrs Malaprop's clandestine flirtation via letters to the ludicrous Lucius O'Trigger (re-imagined as an American tycoon/"typhoon" rather than an Irish chancer).

The transition to the glamorous (and highly unrealistic) world of giddy young flappers bewildering their old-school elders works remarkably well, and the cast manage multiple scene changes in semi-darkness with consummate aplomb, blending the removal and replacement of furniture items with sophisticated dance-steps to bright 1920s-style music. The high level of energy and speed of delivery make for an invigorating and amusing evening, and the text, which could sound rather stilted if kept in its original 18th-century milieu, fizzed with the glitter of the play's updated setting.

The Line of Beauty

by Jack Holden based on Alan Hollinghurst's novel

seen at the Almeida theatre on 29 November 2025

Michael Grandage directs Jasper Talbot as Nick Guest in Jack Holden's adaptation of Alan Hollinghurst's 2004 novel The Line of Beauty. Nick, a naive young gay man, has accepted the invitation of his university friend Toby Fedden (Leo Suter) to lodge in his parents' London house while he researches for his doctorate on Hogarth's aesthetics of beauty. Gerald Fedden (Charles Edwards) has become a Tory MP in the 1983 election so Nick is on the periphery of the euphoria surrounding Margaret Thatcher's second election victory in a house of philistine parents with "progressive" pretensions (they are studiedly tolerant of Nick's being gay). At the same time he becomes entangled in the family dynamics through "Cat-stitting" - looking out for Toby's wayward sister Cat (Ellie Bamber).

Nick is also taking his first steps into the gay world, uncertainly with Leo (Alistair Nwachukwu) whom he has met through classified ads (the print pre-cursor to social media), and then even more uncertainly but also consequentially with Wani Ouradi (Arty Froushan), a wealthy and dissolute entrepreneur with whom he sets up a magazine devoted to the exposition of beauty. Inevitably, as tolerance decreases during the 1980s and the AIDS crisis begins to take its toll, Nick's worlds begin to collide rather than to cohere, and his blithe way of muddling through his life completely fails to shield him from a stark turn of events.

The novel is a rich examination of the contradictions of the time - the hedonism of some, the blindness of others, the frightening power of the establishment to protect itself at all costs - and this adaptation cleverly captures these themes in dramatic terms without being didactic or too expository. Nick's initial blandness, well portrayed by Jasper Talbot, allows for some cringing social comedy as he witnesses and uneasily adopts the superficial glamour of the Feddens, but his later outbursts of grief and anger are no match for entrenched prejudice. Yet even as he is rejected by the Fedddens he is transfixed by the beauty he sees in the park outside their house - the line of beauty has always guided him.

Christopher Oram's set hints at the general opulence of Nick's surroundings, framed by elegant mouldings and signified by various items of furniture indicating the Feddens' London house, their country retreat, the offices set up by Wani for the magazine and so forth. This allows for a fluid passage through the years and locations with minimal fuss. Perhaps the full force of Cat's trajectory is rather muted, so that her part in the final turn of events is not entirely clear, but all in all this is a fine rendering of. the novel on the stage.