The Rivals a jaunty riff on passion & trust
N.B. BLR gives readers a Quicky version that features a few paragraphs that sum up my overall take on the show. Readers who want more back-story & production details can read the expanded review in the Wordy version that follows.
Quicky version
From the footlights : Only a society built on class distinctions and their inherent hubris is capable of producing the kind of satire about sexual passions and social foibles that Richard Brinsley Sheridan scripted in 1775. For Blackbird Theatre's 10th anniversary in 2015, meanwhile, director Johnna Wright's cut at it sparkles with cheeky merriment at love's labours lost and won and abandoned along the way.
Only a society built on class distinctions and their inherent hubris is capable of producing the kind of satire about sexual passions and social foibles that Richard Brinsley Sheridan scripted in 1775. For Blackbird Theatre's 10th anniversary in 2015, meanwhile, director Johnna Wright's cut at it sparkles with cheeky merriment at love's labours lost and won and abandoned along the way.
The play is fast-forwarded to the Edwardian epoch to catch Downton Abbey fans, presumably. Lydia Languish is a bookish romantic whose guardian is her dowager aunt Mrs. Malaprop who frets and fusses over her mercilessly, applying the same badger ferocity with which she attacks the English language. Lydia falls for a lovable lout called "Ensign Beverly" who is actually Captain Jack Absolute in masquerade. When "Beverly" is unmasked, Lydia rejects the captain abruptly for his duplicity. By way of counterpoint to these lovers' squabbles are Faulkland who is hyper-jealous of his faithful Julia, Lydia's sensible cousin. He is forever doubting and fretting how to test and re-test Julia's fidelity, which drives her to distraction if not outright despair.
No question, whenever eros meets neuros there's always much to snigger at regardless of the age or locale. But poignance is possible in the piece, too, particularly in light of our social-media-infected world : "Who can you trust?" is a motif 100% current. But that is decidedly second fiddle to the chorus of giggly nonsense primarily at play here.
The two chief characters of the play are Mrs. Malaprop whose mangling of the mother tongue spawned the word "malapropism". Is she a grotesque buffoon or just a repressed middle-age wannabe lover herself? Yes. Particularly in the way her role is captured by Gabrielle Rose -- utterly engaging & endearing. Opposite in risible bluster is Sir Anthony Absolute, Jack's aging [50-something...] tyrannical dad played with joyous bombast and rocketing blood pressure by that perennial Bard favourite Duncan Fraser.
Wordy version
The play is fast-forwarded to the Edwardian epoch to catch Downton Abbey fans, presumably. Lydia Languish is a bookish romantic whose guardian is her dowager aunt Mrs. Malaprop who frets and fusses over her mercilessly, with the same badger ferocity with which she attacks the English language. Lydia falls for a loveable lout called "Ensign Beverly" who is actually Captain Jack Absolute in masquerade. When "Beverly" is unmasked, Lydia rejects the captain abruptly for his duplicity. By way of counterpoint to these lovers' squabbles are Faulkland who is hyper-jealous of his faithful Julia, Lydia's sensible cousin. He is forever doubting and fretting how to test and re-test Julia's fidelity, which drives her to distraction if not outright despair.
No question, whenever eros meets neuros there's always much to snigger at regardless of the age or locale. But poignance is possible in the piece, too, particularly in light of our social-media-infected world : "Who can you trust?" is a motif 100% current. But that is decidedly second fiddle to the chorus of giggly nonsense primarily at play here.
How it's all put together : Many of the play's elements with its one plot and two or three sub-plots are taken straight out of Sheridan's rowdy youth including the famous duel-that-wouldn't-die scene, an elopement plot, a brash and scheming Irishman being swoon'd over, social pretenders of all stripe and costume.
The two chief characters of the play are Mrs. Malaprop whose mangling of the mother tongue spawned the word "malapropism". Is she a grotesque buffoon or a striving middle-age wannabe lover herself? Yes, particularly in the way her role is captured by Gabrielle Rose -- utterly engaging & endearing. Opposite in mirth and bluster is Sir Anthony Absolute, Jack's aging tyrannical dad played with joyous bombast and rocketing blood pressure by that perennial Bard favourite Duncan Fraser.
Originally the play ran to five acts, and on opening night 2 1/2 centuries back it was booed and hissed at. At one point even a half-eaten apple was hucked at the actors by the angry audience. The show closed immediately. But the clever ambitious Sheridan managed a massive gutteral re-write in just 10 days. When the new tailor-made and vastly tightened version re-opened, it was greeted gustily with guffaws and congrats and soon became a favourite at court. Its subsequent successes at the box office were so substantial Sheridan was able to buy the famous Drury Lane Theatre from his profits.
What the show brings to the stage : The values Sheridan satirizes and pricks with his deft needling diction would not pass muster at any of today's "safe space" universities. The "trigger words" fly fast and furious from the characters' mouths and while generally "polite", they promote the usual patriarchal sexual stereotyping common through all Western history. Telling son Jack of his impending conditional inheritance, Dad reveals that "the fortune is saddled with a wife, but that shouldn't make a difference..."
Woman are seen as wont to frivolous diversion and to have one primary purpose (as the men see it) : to "marry well" and "keep their place". But Sheridan also had sufficient insight to embellish and burnish the role of the romantic, the rogue, the defier of straitjacket tradition, too. Lydia, given to reading dime novels named The Innocent Adultery and The Memoirs of a Lady of Quality, dreams of eloping with a poor foot soldier. She schemes how she will scandalize her aunt and earn the envious scorn of readers from a few newspaper paragraphs that dutifully announce her defection.
Called "a deliberate simpleton" and a "stubborn little vixen" by Aunt Mal, she is also derided by Sir Anthony : "Thought does not become young women." Their thinking he blames on the traveling library that visits the district regularly. "The girl's mad, her brain's turned by reading. She's bedlam!" he croaks.
What makes a play such as this work in 2016? The cleverness not of the plot, surely, but of the characters whose duplicitous and confused interplay make for antic manic tomfoolery cut loose. There are many "rivals" for affection here.
"Ensign Beverly" is a rival of real-life Jack Absolute (Martin Happer) for the affections of Lydia (Emma Slipp), both of whom are rivals to Bob Acres (Kirk Smith) who's a nerdish dandyish chappy.
Mrs. Malaprop (Gabrielle Rose) is a rival to a fictional "Delia" she's created who in breathless notes is made out to be someone much younger by the horny Irishman Lucius O'Trigger (Scott Bellis).
Faulkland (John Emmet Tracy) is his own rival for Julia (Luisa Jojic) due to his impuissant self-pitying ego needs. Maid Lucy (Jenny Wasko-Paterson) promotes all this rivalry by being double-agent provocateur in delivering and withholding the others' various love letters back-&-forth.
It's the dialogue that's sick : Political correctness considerations aside, Sheridan's dialogue is "sick" as the Millennials might say. Never mind Mrs. Malaprop's use of "alliterate" when she means "obliterate". Or "laconically" when she means "ironically". Or "supercilious" when she means "superficial", "malevolence" when she means "benevolence" &c. &c. This repeated goofiness, one might suggest to Mr. Sheridan's dust, is done to a fault lit.&fig. Still, perhaps her best line was "Our retrospectives shall be all on the future!"
But also this. How to top Jack's description of his friend, the lachrymose and sulky Faulkland : "You are a tedious, captious, incorrigible man who suffers a farrago of doubts, fears, hopes, wishes and all that flimsy furniture." This is buzzkill from a buddy that would shame anyone with a tit of insight.
The character Bob Acres has determined that forthright profanity wins no friends in polite circles. So instead of ejaculations such as "Balls, man!" or "Bollix you bunt!" or "Sod you!" he dresses his curses up with quasi-panache : "Odds, spots and flames!" he belches, or "Odds, triggers and hilts!" Quite fun, this.
Acting pin-spots : As noted, clearly the Sheridan script hi-lites the characters Mrs. Malaprop and Sir Anthony. But both my wife and I from this production found the stage work of Kirk Smith as Bob Acres absolutely show-stealing. His initial exchanges with Mr. Tracy as Faulkland were clever enough, but the bandaged foot sequences to start Act 2 and his pusillanimous poseur piece as Prince Valiant before the impending duel were simply riotous.
Great eye-batting along the way from Ms. Slipp as Lydia, while Luisa Jojic as her taken-for-granted heartbroken cousin was a treat to watch. As Faulkland, Mr. Tracy managed to wring every ounce of meaning possible from the words "but" and "yet" to great comic effect as he waffled about whether Julia was true to him for real or not. Good Cockney knock-off, consistently, by Ms. Wasko-Paterson as the cross-dressed manservant David.
Duncan Fraser's lascivious and slavering descriptions of Lydia to his son Jack were comic turns of the highest order despite how hoary they might sound to the 2016 ear.
Woman are seen as wont to frivolous diversion and to have one primary purpose (as the men see it) : to "marry well" and "keep their place". But Sheridan also had sufficient insight to embellish and burnish the role of the romantic, the rogue, the defier of straitjacket tradition, too. Lydia, given to reading dime novels named The Innocent Adultery and The Memoirs of a Lady of Quality, dreams of eloping with a poor foot soldier. She schemes how she will scandalize her aunt and earn the envious scorn of readers from a few newspaper paragraphs that dutifully announce her defection.
Called "a deliberate simpleton" and a "stubborn little vixen" by Aunt Mal, she is also derided by Sir Anthony : "Thought does not become young women." Their thinking he blames on the traveling library that visits the district regularly. "The girl's mad, her brain's turned by reading. She's bedlam!" he croaks.
What makes a play such as this work in 2016? The cleverness not of the plot, surely, but of the characters whose duplicitous and confused interplay make for antic manic tomfoolery cut loose. There are many "rivals" for affection here.
"Ensign Beverly" is a rival of real-life Jack Absolute (Martin Happer) for the affections of Lydia (Emma Slipp), both of whom are rivals to Bob Acres (Kirk Smith) who's a nerdish dandyish chappy.
Mrs. Malaprop (Gabrielle Rose) is a rival to a fictional "Delia" she's created who in breathless notes is made out to be someone much younger by the horny Irishman Lucius O'Trigger (Scott Bellis).
Faulkland (John Emmet Tracy) is his own rival for Julia (Luisa Jojic) due to his impuissant self-pitying ego needs. Maid Lucy (Jenny Wasko-Paterson) promotes all this rivalry by being double-agent provocateur in delivering and withholding the others' various love letters back-&-forth.
It's the dialogue that's sick : Political correctness considerations aside, Sheridan's dialogue is "sick" as the Millennials might say. Never mind Mrs. Malaprop's use of "alliterate" when she means "obliterate". Or "laconically" when she means "ironically". Or "supercilious" when she means "superficial", "malevolence" when she means "benevolence" &c. &c. This repeated goofiness, one might suggest to Mr. Sheridan's dust, is done to a fault lit.&fig. Still, perhaps her best line was "Our retrospectives shall be all on the future!"
But also this. How to top Jack's description of his friend, the lachrymose and sulky Faulkland : "You are a tedious, captious, incorrigible man who suffers a farrago of doubts, fears, hopes, wishes and all that flimsy furniture." This is buzzkill from a buddy that would shame anyone with a tit of insight.
The character Bob Acres has determined that forthright profanity wins no friends in polite circles. So instead of ejaculations such as "Balls, man!" or "Bollix you bunt!" or "Sod you!" he dresses his curses up with quasi-panache : "Odds, spots and flames!" he belches, or "Odds, triggers and hilts!" Quite fun, this.
Acting pin-spots : As noted, clearly the Sheridan script hi-lites the characters Mrs. Malaprop and Sir Anthony. But both my wife and I from this production found the stage work of Kirk Smith as Bob Acres absolutely show-stealing. His initial exchanges with Mr. Tracy as Faulkland were clever enough, but the bandaged foot sequences to start Act 2 and his pusillanimous poseur piece as Prince Valiant before the impending duel were simply riotous.
Great eye-batting along the way from Ms. Slipp as Lydia, while Luisa Jojic as her taken-for-granted heartbroken cousin was a treat to watch. As Faulkland, Mr. Tracy managed to wring every ounce of meaning possible from the words "but" and "yet" to great comic effect as he waffled about whether Julia was true to him for real or not. Good Cockney knock-off, consistently, by Ms. Wasko-Paterson as the cross-dressed manservant David.
Duncan Fraser's lascivious and slavering descriptions of Lydia to his son Jack were comic turns of the highest order despite how hoary they might sound to the 2016 ear.
Who gonna like : Lovers of the English language that is spit out and spun forth with ironic twists and turns at nearly every single word are the folks this show is designed for. Not surprising, it was largely a sea of white heads at last night's performance, not more than a handful of college kids or high schoolers anywhere in sight. Bard on the Beach fans were in abundance and chortling mightily at all the silly palaver being diddled back and forth. This reviewer is one of the "folks this show is designed for". Johnna Wright's blocking and staging of the characters and their zip-gun repartee were all sheer delight to behold. (And not to forget how much Sheila White's costumes are a rich & sumptuous treat to feast one's eyes on, too!)
Particulars : Produced by Blackbird Theatre [Artistic Director John Wright] in collaboration with The Cultch. At the Historic Theatre, 1895 Vennables. On thru January 23rd. Run-time some 140 minutes with intermission. Box office 604.251.1363 -or- via the internet at tickets.thecultch.com.
Production team : Playwright Richard Brinsley Sheridan. Director Johnna Wright. Set Designer David Roberts. Costume Designer Sheila White. Lighting Designer Alan Brodie. Production Manager Jayson McLean. Production Assistant Ariel Martz-Oberlander. Composer Bruce Ruddell. Stage Manager Joanne P.B. Smith.
Performers : Scott Bellis (Lucius O'Trigger). Duncan Fraser (Sir Anthony Absolute). Martin Happer (Jack Absolute). Luisa Jojik (Julia Melville). Gabrielle Rose (Mrs. Malaprop). Emma Slipp (Lydia Languish). Kirk Smith (Bob Acres). John Emmet Tracy (Faulkland). Jenny Wasko-Paterson (Lucy/David).
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