England’s oldest continually operating (more or less) theatre has reopened in fine form after major refurbishment works. The notoriously dodgy seating has been replaced a mere 50 years after the promise was made to do so, and somehow the miracle has been achieved of providing larger and comfier 21st-century-bum-sized seats whilst also increasing the theatre’s capacity to some 540. Disastrous 1970s “modernisations” have been rectified to place auditorium and stage in a more authentic spatial and acoustic relationship, and throughout the project architect Andrzej Blonski has skilfully and sensitively preserved, reinstated or alluded to features from the theatre’s original 1760s build whilst making it admirably fit for modern use. Artistic director Tom Morris has also added a generous sprinkling of playful touches such as mock-historical signage.
    
The opening main-house production takes a similar approach in updating a Georgian piece and taking it seriously and joyously at once. Hazlitt called John O’Keeffe “the English Molière” (blithely ignoring his Irishness), and this 1791 piece is a comedy of romance and manners very much in that key, with all kinds of obstacles, stratagems and ultimately rediscovered family ties… although I’m uncertain that even Molière could have shoehorned sailors, actors and Quakers on to the same stage. Director Mark Rosenblatt and dramaturg Joel Horwood have done a number of noticeable but seldom outright obtrusive rewrites, and Rosenblatt has also decided to give the piece a 1940s/50s staging, from costuming to a Dick Dale-esque surf-rock score.
    
The resulting broth tastes better than that description may suggest. The comedy rollicks along yet a poignancy also emerges in the final scene, even amidst all the “long-lost” absurdities; in this final phase Kim Wall finds admirable humanity beneath the surface bluster of Sir George Thunder, the hitherto-tyrannical father. Stewart Wright reprises his lovable-lummock turn from Morris’s Swallows And Amazons as Sir George’s bo’s’un-turned-valet, and Sam Alexander as the romantic lead Jack Rover gets to pepper his lines with quotations from pretty much the complete works of Shakespeare (or, as the theatre’s signs deliberately spell it, Shakespere). Jo Herbert is Jack’s innamorata, slowly awakening from the Puritanical thrall of Philip Bird’s Tartuffian Ephraim Smooth. The only two minor disappointments are that we do not get to see the threatened version of As You Like It, and that we will have to wait until 2016 for the completion of phase two of the refurb to work corresponding wonders on the architectural jumble that is the theatre’s front of house.
     
Written for the Financial Times.