Review: The School for Scandal (Royal Shakespeare Theatre)

Review by Raphael Kohn

⭐️⭐️

From the moment you enter the cavernous Royal Shakespeare Theatre in Stratford-Upon-Avon, you know you’re in for quite the night. Mainly because your retinas almost instantly begin to burn from the neon pink floor, wall and lighting, blazing bright, brilliant colour into your eyes from the very first minute. It’s pretty clear there’s very little in the way of subtlety for the next three hours.

Largely faithful to Richard B. Sheridan’s original script (with some edits), this new adaptation takes the text and romps it up a lot in camp style. It’s a play about gossip and scandal – that much is already clear from the title – but intertwined in are subplots galore of who loves who, who tricks who, and who’s trying to influence who. There are disguises, innuendos, and twists. It’s… well, it’s a lot.

And if a plot summary is difficult to follow, this production finds its faults in making this convoluted and chaotic plot even more confusing. It’s rarely not-entertaining – that’s for sure – but there are times when the question of what exactly is entertaining us arises. Is it the precise slapstick? The hyper-stylised campness that permeates through every single moment for every single character in every single setting in every single word? The aggressively over-the-top reactions to each and every line? Perhaps it’s even a combination of all of these.

This hyper-stylisation is a permanent fixture. On Alex Lowde’s set, everything is pink. Literally, everything (apart from a few costumes). So I hope you like pink, because you’re not getting much else. Director Tinuke Craig also amps up the campiness of the show, with every moment played to 100%, every character hopping around ridiculously all of the time. Don’t get me wrong, I adore camp. But sometimes, when absolutely everything is played to the maximum, it becomes a bit overwhelming. Every actor popping out of the stage lifts does so in the most obnoxiously over-the-top way that it risks losing the humour entirely and just obscuring Sheridan’s comedy with slapstick.

Flinging themselves around the stage is a large ensemble – some of which are shared with the RSC’s current production of The Merry Wives of Windsor (playing in repertory with The School for Scandal). There are obvious parallels to be seen here – Jason Thorpe’s brilliantly ridiculous Dr Caius from Merry Wives gets a reprise in his gloriously camp Crabtree, while Patrick Walshe McBride’s Sir Benjamin Backbite is almost identical to his Slender in Merry Wives. None of it’s bad stuff though – just as in Merry Wives, these two give wonderful performances.

There’s joy too In Tadeo Martinez’s slithering Snake, and Wil Johnson’s scheming Sir Oliver Surface. Loving every moment of his disguises and deviousness, Johnson really does get some of the best moments to himself. Meanwhile, John Leader gets a proper glam-rock moment as Charles Surface, microphone in hand and stunningly draped in a gorgeous garment.

Meanwhile, the slightly sidelined women do their best with their roles, with Yasemin Özdemir and Tara Tijani finding their own moments to shine in their roles of Maria and Lady Teazle respectively. Tijani relishes every moment she has, fan in hand, as she playfully enjoys the chaos unfurling.

Yet all of the actors find themselves trapped in this strange situation where they’re all trying to fit the brief of ‘camp’. There’s not much else to what they all do, it’s just being as camp as possible. And so, a competition begins to happen, where each actor is procedurally trying to one-up their co-stars, being that much camper, that much more extreme, and that much more ridiculous than the last, that the performances on the whole begin to suffer. They’re talented actors, no doubt, but depth begins to be lost in this production.

But they’re all decked out in some pretty incredible stuff. Lowde not only designs the set but the costumes as well, blending together 1700s fashion, full of ruffs and frills, with more modern stylisations (the pink is expected at this point). This is one of the high points of the show – every costume reveal is utterly divine. Craig stages the opening as a fashion parade down a catwalk; it feels like a thoroughly deserved showcase of Lowde’s work.

These fashion parades, catwalks, and clubs are all clear features in Craig’s Scandal. There’s pulsating club beats from the very beginning, fantastically mixed into baroque-sounding harpsichord melodies by composer D.J. Walde. It’s a nice touch. But it’s a pity that, just as in The Merry Wives of Windsor, the band which plays such music only actually does so onstage for the opening and the finale, and otherwise deserts their positions in favour of playing backstage (at least I’m told they were playing live backstage, but they could have been pre-recorded tracks and nobody would have known any different).

It feels important to highlight one thing that this production of Scandal absolutely succeeds in – that they deliberately edit the text to highlight the colonial aspects of the writing, and also remove the antisemitism. Gone is the character of ‘Moses’, the ‘friendly Jew’, and each reference to ‘East India’ is accompanied by snarky comments to reference the colonial aspects to this. It’s not a radical reimagining, nor a sudden tonal shift, but a genuinely effective, intelligent way of not letting such narratives go unchallenged while keeping things consistent.

There’s some substance under all the style. But there’s so much style that the substance gets drowned out at times. And this isn’t a problem when there’s so much to enjoy – I challenge anyone to see this and not laugh along, at least at the beginning. But rather than laughing at the plot, or the jokes, it’s all in-your-face excessiveness, brash from the outset and never ending. I truly hate to give a review with this star rating – indeed, there are things I enjoyed in this production. But I truly could not justify anything else.

The School for Scandal plays in repertory with The Merry Wives of Windsor until 6th September 2024. Tickets from https://www.rsc.org.uk/the-school-for-scandal/

Photos by Marc Brenner