Shakespeare, Sheridan Shows Start Summer Stage Season

The Group 20 Players' sixth season is off to a running start with its bright production of Sheridan's The School for Scandal, which continues at Wellesley's Theatre on the Green through this Saturday.

A study of hypocrites and slanderers and their varied entanglements, the almost 200-year-old play is the classic English comedy of manners, reviving all the wit but not the obscenity of its Restoration predecessors. Even so, for years it could be presented in this country only under the guise of a "Comic Lecture in Five Parts on the Pernicious Vice of Scandal."

Oft-mounted as the play is, you probably will never see it better done; director Jerome Kilty has fashioned a show of amazing freshness and vitality. And Sheridan's barbs are just as relevant and telling today.

The most striking feature of this production is a complete stylistic consistency, which is the hardest virtue to achieve in a period piece like this. Surely this is partly due to the fact that most of the cast have been playing together now for several seasons, and have developed a sort of repertory-company feeling of ensemble. With one exception, every member of the cast down to the tripping maid (Moira Wylie '60) and whirlwind butler (Robert Jordan '59) capture the proper unified style in both word and gesture.

Top honors must go to Max Adrian, the "old, dangling" Sir Peter Teazle, and Cavada Humphrey, his young bride Lady Teazle. Adrian is a past master of timing and comic acting--a second "incomparable Max." And young as he is, he takes care to embody advanced age to the creakiest hip joint and most unyielding leg muscle, where the best make-up in the world is of no avail.

As usual, it is a joy to watch Miss Humphrey's lovely carriage and to listen to her crystal-clear diction. She knows how to say "fortyoon" instead of "fawchoon," and how to put the accent on the first syllable of "despicable," where it belongs.

The other roles are well handled, and I should like to mention at least Dee Victor (Lady Sneer-well), Olive Dunbar (Lady Candour), Frederic Warriner (Sir Benjamin Backbite), Stanley Jay (Old Rowley), and Robert Evans (Charles Surface). The only jarring notes are contributed by Thomas Hill (Sir Oliver Surface), who, fine as he is in the more realistic modern repertory, cannot attune his diction to the period style required here.

William D. Roberts has designed another of his handsomely symmetrical two-level unit sets, complete with the celebrated gallery of ten ancestral portraits.

This sprightly production definitely warrants your transferring from the Summer School to the Scandal School for one evening this week.