The School for Scandal and Other Plays, by Richard Brinsley Sheridan

I bought this Penguin Classics edition second-hand an age ago because David Whitaker (about whom I wrote a book, which I never mention) had played Sir Oliver Surface to great acclaim in a 1957 production of A School for Scandal at the Theatre Royal in York, the cast including John Barrie, Derek Martinus and Titus Oates, who later changed his professional name to Simon and was in Doomwatch. 

Skimming through the script of that particular play, I got a sense of the farcical comedy, and the kindly, authoritative role. The book comprises three plays by Sheridan: The Rivals (1775), The Critic (1779) and The School for Scandal (1777). Reading them all now, at a more leisuredly rate and without an agenda, I've been delighted by the modern-feeling pace and the quality of gags. In The Rivals, for example, Lydia races to tidy up her salacious novels before posh visitors walk in, and asks her servant to help:

LYDIA: Here, my dear Lucy, hide these books - quick, quick - fling Peregrine Pickle under the toilet - throw Roderick Random into the closet - put The Innocent Adultery into The Whole Duty of Man - thrust Lord Aimworth under the sofa - cram Ovid behind the bolster - there - put The Man of Feeling into your pocket... (p. 48).

Sat in a quiet library last week, "Put The Man of Feeling into your pocket" made me snort out loud.

Likewise, The Critic has an amazing sequence in which abominable playwright Sir Fretful Plagiary insists he never reads reviews in papers. The mischievous Mr Dangle says this is just as well, as the reviews are particularly awful. Plagiary can't resist asking what is said, so Dangle provides a whole page of different example, ripping into every aspect of Plagiary's work, and Plagiary must pretend not to be offended.

We then visit rehearsals for a play, The Spanish Armada, into which the author has inserted a romance between the daughter of the head of the English fort at Tilbury and one of the Spanish sailors, no matter how improbable this might be. This sailor has the most amazing, authentically Spanish name: Don Ferolo Whiskerandos. Scenes of this terrible play out with critics commenting on further outlandish devices: characters telling each other things they already know, or the overuse of research (one character, known to have been a good dancer, duly enters a supposedly tense scene with his toes turned out). You could make a checklist of this stuff and use it to teach creative writing.

The School for Scandal is very Bridgerton, involving society gossips who then get caught up in their own scandals, and various people donning different person to find out what people are really like. The morality is all a bit twisted, which makes it surprising and fun. There is a ridiculous scene involving two people both hiding, separately, in the same room which often seems to have been performed as a standalone scene, such as in the 

The plays are peppered with references to contemporary people and things, which need a bit of explaining in footnotes. I'm not sure how funny these would have been, even at the time - it's a lazy kind of placeholder comedy, where you trick a laugh from the audience by naming something they recognise. Sometimes, Sheridan does something a bit more witty than that, such as in The Critics where it seems the famous actors being praised or critiqued in a scene are the very men who'd have been on stage in it.

For all the wit and zip feel up to date, the plays are oddly unstructured and they each just sort of stop. I was prompted to read up more on Sheridan, and discovered his private life was even more scandalous than the intrigues staged here. What a binfire - and knowing this, you can feel the chaos in his writing.