Preview: The Rivals, Bristol Old Vic

Georgian Bath, with its fashionable costumes, elegant dances, strict social manners and swarms of rich folk suffering from various real and imagined maladies, makes a ripe setting for comedy. And nowhere is this scene better satirised than in The Rivals, Richard Brinsley Sheridan’s 1775 comedy about manners, mores and malapropisms among the fashionable Bath set.

Anglo-Irish playwright Sheridan had recently moved to Bath himself, as a young newlywed: and at the tender age of 24 he set this, his first play, in his adoptive hometown, supposedly using some of his own romantic misadventures as dramatic fodder. His elegant comedy of manners almost single-handedly revived the Restoration comedy form, turning traditional melodrama on its head as it went. Its Anglo-Irish author went on to crown it with The School for Scandal, before abandoning his writing for a career in politics.

The Rivals is centred around the fashionable society makes its annual summer pilgrimage to Bath to take the waters, show off its finery, enjoy the gossip and pursue romance. The play traces the path of true love for Captain Jack Absolute and the incurable romantic Lydia Languish, who – prompted by a surfeit of cheap romantic fiction – has decided to fall hopelessly in love with a humble, penniless soldier.

Absolute himself is bothersomely solvent – but, having cottoned onto Lydia’s feelings and strange case of inverted snobbery, he cunningly disguises himself as a poor ensign. Cue all manner of social faux pas and high-society mayhem, not least from the social-climbing ‘pineapple of politeness’, Mrs Malaprop herself, who routinely mangles the English language.

Other comic gems include the blustering Irishman Sir Lucius O’Trigger, the neurotic Falkland – a kind of 18th-century Woody Allen – and the bumpkin Bob Acres. Throughout the course of a single day these suitors and schemers and their servants indulge in an assortment of hilariously extravagant intrigues, before everyone is paired off to their own satisfaction.

In Bristol Old Vic’s new co-production with Citizens Theatre and Liverpool Everyman and Playhouse (a fitting part of the Old Vic’s own 250th birthday celebrations, as the play was penned the very year before the theatre first opened its doors), the fair Lydia is played by Bristol-raised rising star Lucy Briggs-Owen, who recently played Viola in the West End production of Shakespeare in Love to huge critical acclaim.

“The role of Lydia really appealed because she’s a fantasist – and a drama queen,” Lucy reflects. “She has more money than she knows what to do with, and all of these rivals within the play – she absolutely does seem to be the centre of her world. She also says some outrageously self-centred things, which is always quite fun to play!

“I also think she’s pretty ballsy for her time – she’s obsessed with fiction, and playing out all of these different scenarios that she’s read about in books, but she’s her own person too. She won’t just marry whom she’s told to, even if that means forfeiting a large part of her inheritance. The play is also just so full of really comic characters. Obviously it’s a bit of a satire on the time, so these characters are larger than life, and our director Dominic Hill is encouraging that!”

Lucy’s a Bristol girl by birth. “My family are all still here, so they’re my chief tie to the city. At Redland High School I had a wonderful drama teacher, Sarah McCormack. Had I not met her at school, have her champion me, put GCSE then A-Level theatre studies on the map at school, and take school productions so seriously, I’m not sure I would be doing what I do today. I’m eternally grateful to her.”

The Rivals is at Bristol Old Vic from Sept 9-Oct 2. For more details, visit www.bristololdvic.org.uk/therivals.html