The Rivals

This play was first performed two hundred and fifty years ago. The themes covered is this piece of theatrical writing are still very apposite to today’s society even if the  style of language used is very old. Originally in five acts, Barry Syder’s adaptation in two acts must surely have made It a lot clearer to comprehend the plot. It took a short while to get to grips with the main love story as both parties had aliases and were pretending to be in a different social class of the day. I would describe the play as a type of upstairs, downstairs scenario - the servants knowing exactly what their employers were doing and the employers thinking that the servants did not talk about happenings.

Captain Jack Absolute (Dennis Manning), masquerading as Ensign Beverley played a massive part together with his love interest Lydia Languish (Lauren Smith). Through quite complicated amounts of protestations of love but remaining tight-lipped to each other about their true identities, these were excellently played roles who I am delighted to say ended up together eventually. The other two lovers in the story were Lydia’s cousin, Julia Melville (Suzanne Page) and Faulkland (Craig Worsell). Again, these parts were well enacted throughout.

Four other persons confusing the smooth running of the romances were the Captain’s father, Sir Anthony Absolute (Jonathan Hope) - the blustery straight-talking man, Acres (Connor Brennan) - a friend and Sir Lucius O’Trigger (Andrew Bates) an Irish Baronet, who was continually goading others to fight but quite reluctant to do so himself. The well defined characteristics of these three different roles were played to good effect. The fourth fly in the ointment was Mrs. Malaprop (Laine Watson). As the name may suggest, she gave a lot of light humour in her confusion of similar words. I had no idea that this play was where the word “Malapropism” came from.

The downstairs characters we met were servants Lucy (Grace Thomas), Maria (Sarah Thomas), Sara  (Susan Latter) and David (Roger Kidd). Although not quite as much dialogue as the others, the parts that they portrayed were so important to the plot as they tittle-tattled their employers secrets to one another. Also a lovely ending to the evening with a small closing speech/verse from one of the maids.

The scenery was kept quite simple but I was not sure why the settee had to have a different cover or the writing-desk had to be moved to another location between scenes. I assume this was to allow us to see in which person’s house we were in. I found this just a little confusing as the scenes were not listed in the programme.

So to summarise,  a little confusing to start with but all became clear. Adapted very well but old English language needed plenty of concentration. A lot of light humour but most of all plenty of well-characterised portrayals of the varied persons in the story. Congratulations to the production team, actors and backstage crew.       

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