Frances Sheridan must have been disappointed when her play, A Trip to Bath, was rejected by David Garrick, the impresario of Drury Lane, some 230 years ago. Her son, Richard Brinsley, may not have been so professionally upset, for its script seems to have provided him with the progenitor of his later (and less funny) Mrs Malaprop. There is every reason to believe, given the very belated premiere of the work, reworked, retitled and completed by Elizabeth Kuti, and the comprehensively comic performance of Noelle Brown as Mrs Tryfort, that the English language could have included tryfortisms, rather than malapropisms, for the unwitting inclusion of the wrong words in the right places in everyday speech.
The staging of this overdue world premiere has fallen to Rough Magic and, as might be expected, it is very stylish and accomplished. But the style chosen by its director, Lynne Parker, may not be quite the most comfortable to allow the text to shine. Deliberately anachronistic in music and costume, deliberately out of its place in theatrical time in a setting of various classic pillars by Blaithin Sheerin, the narrative seems forced and contrived and uneasy.
The setting is Mrs Surface's unlikely guesthouse, wherein Lady Filmot (Andrea Irvine) and Lord Stewkly (James Wallace) determine to abandon their own romance in order to secure for themselves marital alliances with Edward Bull (Damian McAdam) and Lucy Tryfort (Pauline Hutton), respectively, two gormless youngsters ineptly in love with each other already yet pressed by their relatives to dig for better gold in the marital stakes. Also in the house are the mysterious Mr Stapleton (Robert Price) and the flamboyant French businessman Champignon (Patrick Leech), who has his eye on the impecunious Lady Aircastle (Natalie Stringer), while Mrs Surface has her eye on all of them and their money. Sean Kearns is Edward's dim but decent father, Sir Jonathan Bull, and Arthur Riordan his pretentious brother, Sir Jeremy.
After the customary to-ing and fro-ing, the chases, the retreats and the confusions, just as it seems that poor young Lucy must settle for life as a governess or, worse, a lady novelist, everything is at once unravelled and wound up and there is a hypocritical toast to true love, not a glimmer of which has been perceptible since the start. But it never quite seems to come dramatically alive: we listen rather than get involved so that, in the end, maybe it is the 20th century audience which suffers the greatest disappointment. But thanks are nonetheless due to Ms Kuti and Rough Magic for uniquely offering the possibility of seeing the play.
Plays at the Belltable up to and including next Saturday. Booking on 061-319866. Then tours to the Hawk's Well Theatre, Sligo (April 20-24); Town Hall Theatre, Galway (April 27-May 1); Everyman Palace Theatre, Cork (May 4- 8); and Tallaght Civic Theatre (May 11-22)
