Rock music blares. Performers pose in designer denim and crinoline hoops. The opening of Deborah Warner’s production of Sheridan’s glittering comedy announces the director’s intention to bring the play slamming into the twenty-first century.
Georgian-style painted flats jostle with hectic video art; Brechtian painted banners announce each scene. The gossip-mongers shop at Gucci and their queen bee, the scheming Lady Sneerwell, snorts cocaine while a dresser straps her into her eighteenth-century corsetry and flounces. It is, initially, dazzlingly flashy.
But problems become apparent as soon as the volume gets turned down. Warner’s treatment of Sheridan’s verbal sparring is so earnest, so over-burdened with directorial conceit, that what should sparkle becomes leaden. Above all, it’s simply not funny.
The modern parallels are obvious enough; Warner needn’t beat us about the head with them. She leaves her cast struggling to engage us with story itself, dwarfed as they are by so much effortful stage business.
Alan Howard is an irascible yet touching Sir Peter Teazle, despairingly in love with an effervescent Katherine Parkinson. And Matilda Ziegler’s Sneerwell is all silken, self-consuming malice. But Warner’s production is bludgeoning and a bit of a bore.