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.

Playhouse Creatures

by April De Angelis

seen at the Orange Tree Theatre Richmond on 10 April 2025

When the official London theatres re-opened in the 1660s after an 18-year hiatus acting skills and traditions had been lost and there were no trained boys to take on the female roles as they had done in Shakespeare's and Jonson's days. For the first time women were on stage professionally, but it was not without controversy and what we would now call trolling.

Playhouse Creatures concerns five such actresses, the unimpeachable Mrs Betterton (Anna Chancellor), married to the important theatrical manager Thomas Betterton, Mrs Marshall (Katherine Kingsley), Mrs Farley (Nicole Sawyerr), Doll Common (Doña Croll) and of course the up-and-coming Nell Gwyn (Zoe Brough). The title "Mrs" was a sop to respectability, and did not necessarily imply the presence or even existence of a corresponding "Mr", while Doll Common was actually Katherine Corey, forever associated with a part she played in Jonson's The Alchemist.

April De Angelis has created a play examining the highs and lows of these women's experiences, including some amusing pastiches of the kinds of roles for which they became famous - there was always an element of ogling involved on the part of the audience, not to say outright harassment, and though actresses could be taken up by aristocrats and even the King, they could also be dropped and vilified. The play covers all these eventualities in episodes mostly based on historical fact (though there were actually two Marshall sisters).

The play seems to be the dream reminiscence of Doll Common, portrayed here more as a wardrobe mistress and long-term confidante of Mrs Betterton than as an actress in her own right. The irrepressible Nell bursts into the lives of the others with blithe insouciance and an astonishingly resilient self-belief. Mrs Fawley is not so lucky, her career effectively destroyed by an unwanted pregnancy. No amount of sisterly sympathy can overcome the social disgrace once Mrs Fawley quails at the awful realities of an abortion (in the intimacy of the Orange Tree I suspect most of the audience was relieved that she called a halt to proceedings after the first probe proved too much to endure).

Here directed by Michael Oakley, the Orange Tree stage is used to excellent effect as principally a backstage space where the actresses can confer, advise and support one another. The rowdy audiences are just noises off, and a dialogue between Mrs Betterton and her husband, in which she puts the case for actresses owning shares in their company, is all the more poignant for us hearing only one side of the conversation: this as much as anything reminds us that the women's world was totally circumscribed by male power just out of sight.