A high-wattage cast, featuring Patricia Hodge and Robert Bathurst alongside rising stars, arguably enjoys itself more than the audience does in Tom Littler’s 250th anniversary revival of Sheridan’s comedy. The play has been updated to the 1920s, with some characters altered and the famous mis-speakings of Hodge’s Mrs Malaprop given a modern-ish topspin: “menstruations” for “ministrations”, and “typhoon” for “tycoon” - a word coined eight decades after The Rivals was written.
The concept makes a kind of sense: the social codes of 1770s Bath find a more contemporary echo in those of the Jazz Age. And The Rivals is strong enough to endure tinkering, having undergone a more substantial rewrite in Richard Bean and Oliver Chris’s Jack Absolute Flies Again at the National in 2022. But the shouty jollity, the songs and frantic Charleston dancing here feel forced, as if Littler simply doesn’t trust the material to stand up on its own.
