THE SCHOOL FOR SCANDAL

New Zealand Listener, Volume 36, Issue 923, 18 April 1957, Page 3

THE SCHOOL FOR SCANDAL

OME years ago the Oliviers brought Sheridan’s The School for Scandal to delighted audiences in New Zealand. Now, in ZB Sunday Showcase, on April 28, listeners will hear a recording with an equally distinguished cast. Dame Edith Evans plays Lady Sneerwell, the scandal-mongering widow, and Claire Bloom is Lady Teazle, young wife to testy old Sir Peter, here taken by Cecil Parker. Joseph Surface, the hypocrite who passes for a model of virtue, is played by Harry Andrews, and Charles, his spendthrift brother with a heart of gold, by Alec Clunes. Baliol Holloway is Sir Oliver, their rich uncle who re-

turns home from abroad and disguises himself to test his nephews. The characters in The School for Scandal are familiar in fiction, and so is the plot itself. The Teazles quarrel and make up and quarrel again. The hypocritical Joseph plots with Lady Sneerwell that she may win Charles, and he win the heiress Maria (played by Anne Leon). Joseph also makes love to Lady Teazle, and the play comes to a climax in the scene in which they are discovered by the old husband. To conform with the morals of 1777 this scene does not go too far-the villain is foiled and the lady rounds upon him in indignation. Sir Oliver, making trial of his nephews, baffles Joseph’s plot and helps to secure Maria for the warm-

hearted Charles, who has won his uncle’s affection through refusing to part with his particular portrait in a sale by auction of all his ancestors. Sheridan makes the familiar characters so lively and direct that the action springs naturally’ from their dispositions. Minor characters bustle on and off the stage-Snake the mercenary accomplice, played by Michael Gough, Moses the money-lender (George Howe), and Mrs Candour (Athene Seyler), who brings a kind of redeeming jollity to the chorus of scandalmongery, The parts are dovetailed neatly. and the whole structure of the

comedy is a model of design. This play stands as the masterpiece of the English comedy of manners, with all the wit but none of the licentiousness of the Restoration comedy from which it is derived, the most satisfying and witty comedy of character between the death of Farquhar in 1707 and the heyday of Wilde around 1895, Its author, Richard Brinsley Sheridan, was born in Dublin, the son of an actor and an authoress. .He was educated at Harrow and entered as a law student. John Russell’s pastel portrait of him on this page was done when he was 37. Alan Dent, in his introduction to this play for Angel Records, says that as a young and attractive, but improvident young man-his own Charles Surface is recognisably a_ self-port-rait — Sheridan had eloped with the beautiful Miss Linley, daughter of a celebrated music master at Bath "It

seems certain that the first play, The Rivals, was written out of no great dramatic urge, but rather. out of the necessity of keeping the wolf away from the romantic young couple’s door. The wolf, ever partial to men of the theatre, was kept even longer at bay by the instantaneous and prolonged success of The School for Scandal." In 1776, the year between these two plays, Sheridan had bought Garrick’s shares in Drury Lane and’ he rebuilt the theatre in 1794, remaining there until its destruction by fire in 1809. The School for Scandal has won glowing praise from all sorts of critics, and has been an immense favourite

with the public. On its very first appearance in May, 1777, it was the subject of one of the first extant pieces of dramatic criticism by a journal, a review in The London Magazine which called the play "a phenomenon in the theatrical world-a modern comedy unaided by the deceptions of scenery or the absurdities of sing-song and pantomime." The Romantic critics, Leigh Hunt, Lamb and Hazlitt, hailed successive revivals with delighted appreciation. Henry Morley in the middle of the 19th century wrote of a London revival: "The School for Scandal is now 88 years old, but it holds the stage yet with the liveliness and grace of youth. For permanence of interest it is indebted not to the good wit alone, but the good wit is spent on the essentials of human nature and not with the mere accidents of passing fashion." In The Thread of Laughter, published in 1952, Louis Kronengerger pointed out that the play has scandal as its topic, and not sin, as in the century before. "The play is concerned with the imputation of sinning, not with sin itself. The famous screen scene is one of circumstantial evidence only, and guilt is absent. The air of iniquity is, in fact, a false front for the play’s intrinsic innocence. Perhaps," says Mr Kronengerger, "the seeming wickedness of its plot is the most astounding thing about the play. The tone of scandal is set at the beginning, and scenes like the openng one recur all through the play. They constitute its thematic whalebone; equally they are an illusstration of manners and a commentary on society. They give the play spice; they also give it glitter." And yet the first fact to emerge from a Sheridan biography is that the theatre was not his main interest, and

the writings of plays a very minor part of his life. His last major play was written in 1779, and the next year he was elected a member of Parliament, although he retained his interest in Drury Lane until it was burnt down. Many years later he remarked to Creevey, the historian, that the happiest day in his. life was the one on which he was elected to Parliament. He was in the end given a magnificent funeral in the Poets’ Corner of Westminster Abbey, but he would probably have preferred to have been classed as a statesman rather than as a_ poet. Lewis Gibbs, one of his best and most authoritative biographers, substantiated this view: "The aristocratic company which gathered at Sheridan’s grave did not think of him as a dramatist, though, like everyone else, they were well acquainted with his plays, which were still favourite pieces in the repertoire, But the writings of these plays be-

longed to a bygone age-to an age when the French Revolution still lay 10 years in the future and Napoleon now safely in custody at Saint Helena, was a child in Corsica. Besides, if Sheridan had been a dramatist and nothing else-even if he had written a score of plays as brilliant as The School for Scandal-not one of the dukes, earls, marquises, and so forth, would have been present at his funeral. "These knew Sheridan as the follower of Fox, the enemy of Pitt, the friend and adviser of the Prince of Wales, the orator whom they had always heard with attention, generally with pleasure, and often with delight. . . "As to the principal performers of Covent Garden and Drury Lane theatres, who saw Sheridan laid to rest in the Abbey, they remembered him chiefly as the manager of Drury Lane. Some of them perhaps recalled the all too frequent occasions when the affairs of that celebrated house were sadly embarrassed; when salaries were not forthcoming at the end of the week; when business was not attended to and Mr Sheridan could not be seen. It is unlikely that they bore any grudges on these scores, for Sheridan was Sheridan and it was impossible to resist him. Not very long since he had gone to the theatre-the one built in place of his burnt one. He had no theatre of his own to manage or mismanage. He was old and his legs were inclined to be swollen and his face was blotched and discoloured, though his eyes were as fine as ever. He had come into the greenToom and was soon as pleasant and charming as only he could be; and everyone wished him to come again." But then, the eyes and the tongue and the charm were Irish. His masterpiece, like many another example of pure comedy, teaches no lesson and points no distinctive moral, unless it be Sir Peter’s, that the truest form of wit is that most nearly allied to good nature.