Director Tom Littler’s lively production of Goldsmith’s 250-year-old comedy brings it forward from 1773 to 1930 and just before Christmas but, apart from a few tweaks to avoid obvious anachronisms and the addition of a couple of songs, the words are Goldsmith’s original.
As the presents pile up around the Christmas tree in the Hardcastles’ rambling old house in the country, Mr Richard Hardcastle is expecting the arrival of Charles Marlow, the son of his old friend Sir Charles. The fathers plan to matchmake young Charles with Kate, Hardcastle’s daughter. At the same time, Mrs Hardcastle wants to pair her son from her previous marriage, Tony Lumpkin, with her niece, Constance, who is Kate’s best friend. These two have no intention of being wed but play along to please her.
Lumpkin is a bit of a prankster. He encounters young Marlow and his chum Hastings, lost on their way to the Hardcastles and needing a roof for the night. He sends them along to the Hardcastles’ house after making them believe it is an inn, thus setting up the confusion that drives this classic comedy.
With her colourful clothes and plumed coiffure, Greta Scacchi’s Mrs Hardcastle seeks to follow fashion; she resents being cooped up in the country, but her husband is resolutely old fashioned—even his conversation sounds archaic. David Horovitch makes him crusty but kindly, a host baffled by the behaviour of guests who treat their host as hotel staff. His insistence that his daughter dress simply, country housewife style, in the evening in return for being free to do her own thing in the daytime helps in the gulling of young Marlow, in which she becomes a participant, her apparent lowly status freeing him to respond in a way that he finds impossible with women his own class. Tanya Reynolds makes Kate’s role-play delightful and Freddie Fox’s Wooster-like Marlow becomes besotted.
His friend Hastings isn’t quite so naïve; he’s a bit of a fortune hunter, but he does promise happiness for Constance, and Robert Mountford and Sabrina Bartlett are well paired for their scheming (and her dresses are especially stylish).
The production offers an eclectic range of theatrical styles from social satire on class-based double standards to slapstick (Freddie Fox gets a laugh just from the way he is lying). It treats each scene in the way that makes it most effective, and Tom Littler handles the transitions very skilfully, easily embracing even Richard Derrington’s outrageously quivering, bent-backed manservant Diggory with his braying laugh, a role which he doubles with the sedate, elder Marlow.
Neil Irish’s cosy setting with its comfy furniture and wall-mounted hunting trophies makes the transition between real inn to imagined hostelry easy and, since it's Christmas, there’s even some snowfall, and classic comedy here offers a Christmastide outing with a happy hint of panto.