Synopsis Mistaken identity, lust and class are at the heart of this classic comedy set in the rustic England of the 1760s. Sub-titled The Mistakes of a Night. A rich handsome single man, Marlow, is very good at chatting up barmaids, but bashful in front of society ladies. The he falls for Miss Kate Hardcastle and things start to go wrong when his friend persuade him that her family home is in fact the local inn! Sponsored by Travelex £12 Tickets
Dates: Opens 31 January 2012. Feb 7,8,9,15,16,17,18,20,24,25, Mar 2,3,5,6,7,14,15,16,17,19,26,27,28, Apr 3,4,5,7,9,10,11,12,13,14,16,17,18,19,20,21 at 19:30. Feb 8,18,25, Mar 3,7,15,17, Apr 4,7,12,14,19,21 Mats 14:00. Feb 19,26, Mar 18 Mats 14:30
Jamie Lloyd’s production of She Stoops to Conquer opened at the National Theatre this week (31 January, previews from 24 January 2012).
The comedy of manners, written by Oliver Goldsmith, tells the story of Charles Marlow whose nerves get the best of him when around women of the upper class. When Marlow and a friend are staying at what they believe to be a local inn, he meets wealthy Kate Hardcastle. Having already learned of Marlow’s shyness, Kate hopes to marry him but realises she must pose as a maid to gain his attention.
Sophie Thompson, Steve Pemberton and Katherine Kelly star in the revival of this 18th century play which highlights issues of dysfunctional families and courtship, while making audiences chuckle. It continues in rep in the NT Olivier.
"Oliver Goldsmith’s famous 18th century prose comedy is more honoured on the page than on the stage these days, but Jamie Lloyd’s debut production at the National is the best in a long while … The action moves smoothly on the Oliver revolve, and Mark Thompson’s set … Lloyd makes no bones about bathing it all in Neil Austin’s orange, mellow lighting. But his trump card is in the casting of Harry Hadden-Paton as Marlow, a performance of quite unusual technical assurance, sincerity, skill and outstanding comic flair … And he is perfectly partnered by John Heffernan’s hilarious, willowy Hastings, a soft-hearted accomplice … Hastings’ campaign to win Cush Jumbo’s pretty and likeable Constance is in effect prosecuted by his supposed rival, the gloriously free-spirited Lumpkin of David Fynn, the cog in the wheel, the festive sprite … It all looks lovely and traditional while making you realise that much of the comedy deals in dislocation and deceit. The band strikes up, the flower petals descend in a gentle storm, the actors go into their dance once more, the audience smiles and claps.
"This fresh, spirited and often blissfully funny staging at the National Theatre will do very nicely. The play is a marvel, a comedy almost entirely bereft of malice, but one that never seems twee, sentimental or bland … If Jamie Lloyd’s production has a fault it is that it tries just a little too hard to be lovable … Steve Pemberton… fails to eclipse my fond memories of Donald Sinden’s harrumphing, jowl-wobbling outrage as the prosperous householder … And Sophie Thompson overdoes her faux-posh accent, though I must admit I laughed as much as I winced at her at times almost insanely over-the-top performance … Harry Haddon-Paton is superb as Marlow … Katherine Kelly… brings superb assurance to the role of Kate Hardcastle, brimming with mischief in the barmaid scenes … There is superb work, too, from David Fynn, who in an inspired touch gives mischievous misdirection to the posh Londoners with the help of a hare in a state of rigor mortis … At its best this is a great night of high English comedy and when the cast settle down, I suspect it will be even better.
"She Stoops to Conquer is almost 240 years old, but Oliver Goldsmith's tightly plotted play seems wonderfully youthful in this fizzy production … Credit to Jamie Lloyd for his precise direction - and to a buoyant cast … It's joyous stuff - broad yet polished. There's lovely ensemble work, neat movement overseen by Ann Yee, a handsome set by Mark Thompson, and jaunty musical interludes by Ben and Max Ringham that cover the scene changes appealingly … Kelly is wickedly assured … Hadden-Paton makes Marlow sumptuously funny while also suggesting his neurotic tendencies. John Heffernan reveals a gift for comedy as Marlow's friend Hastings, Cush Jumbo dazzles as the object of Hastings' affection, and David Fynn is deliciously robust as Tony Lumpkin … Best of all is Sophie Thompson, who is show-stealingly good as Mrs Hardcastle … Her performance, finely tuned and generous, typifies this sublime account of a somewhat neglected 18th-century classic."
"Luxuriantly staged, extravagantly acted, the big new London production of She Stoops To Conquer leaves little to chance … Large cast, elaborate sets, musical touches: here is a show with its eyes popped wide in determination to amuse .. And yet the comedy is insistent to the point, almost, of bullying. I worried that I was not finding it quite as funny as I was meant to … Oliver Goldsmith’s convoluted plot arguably needs cartooning and it duly receives that from director Jamie Lloyd. He gives the whole thing a flavour of gurning caricature … That brings some benefits – the entr’acte singing provides variety – but it diminishes any sentimentality in the romantic tomfooleries … Steve Pemberton’s Hardcastle is all thick spectacles, bourgeois bombast and simmering outrage. Cheerfully well done … The opening scene with socially ambitious Mrs Hardcastle (Sophie Thompson) gets things off to a belting start. But Miss Thompson – this seems an impossible thing to say about a Mrs Hardcastle – overdoes things … Yet we can still admire the cleverness of the plot and its mazy twists … This show has high production values which match Goldsmith’s masterly scheming … What it lacks is the soul which would lift it above technical expertise into something more affecting.
Libby Purves The Times ★★★★
"Sophie Thompson as Mrs Hardcastle… adopts a bizarre mock-posh 'Faaaarshionable' lisp. Harry Hadden-Paton and John Heffernan willow around as fluting fops, until the former switches into Leslie Phillips woooagggh! mode when the host’s daughter plays the barmaid. That is a grand transition … But don’t expect dramatic depth. Think fairytale, operetta … The staging has its own laughs by flaring a fire, hooting an owl or crashing a thunderclap a split second too late to match the line … The point is that almost everyone is playing a part: either through self-delusion, bravado, or simple cross-purposes … There is faint satire in the way young Marlow thinks it OK to treat the lower orders insolently, but Hadden-Paton is so endearing in a schoolboyish way that you forgive … It’s just fun, from the moment David Fynn’s Lumpkin wanders on scratching his crotch with a half-eaten chicken leg."
"It is a joy to see Oliver Goldsmith's 1773 classic back at the National after a 10-year gap … Jamie Lloyd's production is a collective success … It is its mixture of wit and warmth that keeps Goldsmith's comedy alive … Lloyd's production shrewdly keeps the 18th century setting … Exaggeration, falling just the right side of over-acting, is the keynote. Harry Hadden-Paton as Young Marlow is one moment a picture of paralysed inhibition, and the next a rampant lech pawing the ground like an impatient stallion. He is deftly countered by John Heffernan … There is slightly cooler playing from the highly impressive Kelly … Cush Jumbo matches her well as her genteel cousin, and there is a peach of a performance from David Fynn, who reminds us that Tony Lumpkin, who sets the whole plot up, is less a rustic booby than a good-hearted manipulator. Steve Pemberton adds to the merriment as the expostulating Mr Hardcastle … The production looks handsome: one particular moment, when the scene shifts from a moon-dappled wood to a domestic interior, is even strangely moving. But the real pleasure lies in seeing Goldsmith's great comedy restored to its rightful place in the repertory."
"Jamie Lloyd’s twinkly, high-spirited production of Goldsmith’s 1773 comedy is played with lip-smacking relish … Lloyd and his cast deliver it with plenty of topspin and a pinch of Hogarth … Goldsmith guys the snobbery, hypocrisy and class tensions of his day without cruelty: this is above all a generous comedy. On Mark Thompson’s handsome country house set, the cast totter through the turmoil in wigs, frocks and frock-coats. Harry Hadden-Paton is a comic joy as the conflicted Marlow … John Heffernan brings lovely comic timing to his better adjusted friend, Hastings. Katherine Kelly plays Kate with the right mix of archness and innocence and Cush Jumbo brings lovely vivacity to Constance, Hastings’ girl. Sophie Thompson, meanwhile, turns Mrs Hardcastle into an extraordinary comic creation … The flaw in the production is that it works too hard, belabouring the fun in places so that a degree of romp fatigue sets in. But this is a droll evening of affectionate comedy."
"I was amused to see a credit for an Etiquette Consultant in the programme … There are sequences where you feel that if the 18th century had had its Steven Berkoff and Matthew Bourne, the resulting choreography would have looked a bit like this … Fresh from Coronation Street, the endearingly lanky Katherine Kelly gives a performance of beautifully natural and unforced comic authority as Kate … Sophie Thompson is in glorious form as the domineering and would-be social-climbing Mrs Hardcaste … There's wonderful moment when she drops a deep, graceful curtsey and has to be hauled by main force back upright. Looking like the love-child of Steve Coogan and the late Patrick Campbell, the splendid John Heffernan, as Hastings, offers an object lesson in how to be langudily elegant and amusingly brisk at the same time. A delight."
Oliver Goldsmith’s famous 18th century prose comedy is more honoured on the page than on the stage these days, but Jamie Lloyd’s debut production at the National is the best in a long while and gives off the warm fireside glow of another solid South Bank hit.
She Stoops, or The Mistakes of a Night, is played in real time: two posh town blades, Marlow and Hastings, arrive in a country house they have been tricked into thinking is an inn. They throw orange peel on the floor, trample over the furniture and order their host to bring them a dinner menu. What larks. Marlow has been consigned by his father (the host’s old friend) as a fiancé to the daughter of the house, Kate Hardcastle, and Hastings is besotted with her cousin Constance.
There are stumbling blocks: Marlow can only talk to servants, and freezes in stuttering embarrassment with girls from his own class. Hastings has been thwarted in pursuit of Constance by old Mrs Hardcastle, who wants to hang on to her jewel casket by matching Constance with her own booby-ish, slightly dissolute but good-natured son, Tony Lumpkin.
The action moves smoothly on the Oliver revolve, and Mark Thompson’s set, from the country house to the ale-house and the misty exterior on Crackskull Common (in fact, the bottom of the garden), linked with boisterous scat singing by all the cast of some very appealing music by Ben and Max Ringham.
Lloyd makes no bones about bathing it all in Neil Austin’s orange, mellow lighting. But his trump card is in the casting of Harry Hadden-Paton as Marlow, a performance of quite unusual technical assurance, sincerity, skill and outstanding comic flair.
He twists into a ribbon of dumb helplessness in his interview with Katherine Kelly’s beautifully poised Kate; then finds his inner animal, pawing the ground and shaking his fetlocks when Kate comes on to him as the lubricious “barmaid.”
And he is perfectly partnered by John Heffernan’s hilarious, willowy Hastings, a soft-hearted accomplice who fouls up badly and pleads the torture of his situation as his only excuse. Ah, bless. Hastings’ campaign to win Cush Jumbo’s pretty and likeable Constance is in effect prosecuted by his supposed rival, the gloriously free-spirited Lumpkin of David Fynn, the cog in the wheel, the festive sprite.
The senior Hardcastles are uproariously done by Steve Pemberton and Sophie Thompson, the latter playing the grotesquerie of her pretentions with an alarming mixture of savage excess and steely precision. She even gets away with the old gag of sinking to the floor in a curtsy and creaking back upwards with great difficulty, twice, and tops that by extracting not one, but two, two exit “rounds.”
It all looks lovely and traditional while making you realise that much of the comedy deals in dislocation and deceit. The band strikes up, the flower petals descend in a gentle storm, the actors go into their dance once more, the audience smiles and claps… Whatever happened to Brecht? Who, for the minute, cares?
I saw this yesterday and was very impressed by the whole thing. The cast are terrific and Katherine Kelly was very good indeed. But it was Sophie Thompson who stole the show, she was bloody hilarious! A very enjoyable evening. - Sam
11 Apr 12
Never mind musicals, London is full of comedies at the moment - you would think we're in the middle of a depression! Unfortunately Jamie Lloyd's production of Goldsmith's classic was greeted with almost total stony silence. Part of the problem is that One Man, Two Guvnors has set the bar so high that everyone seemed to be trying much too hard to replicate everything that made Guvnors such a runaway success. There's physical comedy, asides to the audience, the now obligatory musical interludes and performances that strain the limits of coarse acting. Sophie Thompson, at her usual megaphone volume, shamelessly attempts to upstage everyone which quickly becomes tiresome and one of her range of "funny" accents is like an Irish woman washed up in Jamaica. Much better were those who trusted in Goldsmith's text and gave more natural performances, notably John Heffernan and Katherine Kelly. Soap actors are frequently patronised as basically playing versions of themselves but Ms Kelly proves the exception to that rule - she did go to RADA after all. There is a lovely scene change as the country house evolves into a misty wood, but for long stretches She Stoops to Conquer proved to be disappointingly hard work and failed to provide an antidote to all the current gloom and despondency. - David Baxter
16 Mar 12
Very good - another solid hit from the National. I particularly liked David Flynn's turn as Lumpkin, but overall this is a show to treasure. We really are very lucky to have the National Theatre. - addicted to theatre
18 Feb 12
Delightfully frothy, production. Great ensemble, some great physical comedy, and more than anything a very clearly told story (which is a blessing given how convoluted it could have been!). Brilliant turns from John Heffernan and Sophie Thompson. My only criticism of it is that Lloyd seems to have been a little bit scared to use the space of the gigantic Olivier stage and that it all seems to be played like it's on a prosc stage so that 50% of the audience is somewhat ignored 70% of the time (i've noticed this is his previous shows too). However, he does seem to be somewhat a genius in getting brilliant performances out of his actors, so it's a minor inconvenience (which i hope he learns to get better at in the future). - Cassox
18 Feb 12
Considering how old this play is, it is great and funny and this production first class with a great cast. Great to see Katherine Kelly out of her Becky of Corrie accent(though loved her in that)and she plays Kate in the play well and loved Steve Pemberton as the father and of course the great Sophie Thompson as the Mother gives another superb and hilarious performance. Every time she left the stage she got applause--her delivery of the lines are just perfect. A very good play and recommend people to see it if they can - Joe Spiteri
16 Feb 12
Good fun. Comparing it to comedies currently playing, I'd say it's funnier than Noises Off and Ladykillers, but less funny than Comedy of Errors and One Man, Two Guvnors. This is broad comedy. This is pantomime. The fourth wall is breached and the audience are spoken to. And if that sounds like it will annoy you, then it will. And if you like that sort of thing, then you'll like this. It's all a matter of taste. The worst thing about this production is the play itself. The first act is all exposition exposition exposition, blah blah blah. I would have preferred this play to be rewritten by Richard Bean. What is best about this production are the performances. As you'd wish from a pantomime, all the performances are bold and exaggerated and lack the poison of self-consciousness. Reminiscent of the central trio of Blackadder the Third, John Heffernan (Hastings aka Blackadder), Harry-Hadden-Paton (Marlow aka the Prince/ and David Fynn (Lumpkin aka Baldrick) play well off each other. Fynn comes up with cunning plans in the most brazen amusing ways; Hadden-Paton stutters and stumbles yet is lascivious and lewd with equal brio; and Heffernan is intelligent and funny and charming and throwaway, just as you'd wish. Katherine Kelly is like a duck to water, luminous and confident. Cush Jumbo is her equal. But it is Sophie Thompson who proves she is a national treasure of a comedienne, giving the most brash, varied, pompous, strange, accented comic performance of her life. - steveatplays
08 Feb 12
I loved everything about this production – a thing of great joy and a triumphant NT debut for director Jamie Lloyd. It’s the equal of the recent London Assurance on the same stage and for a play that’s almost 250 years old, it’s as fresh as they come.
Oliver Goldsmith’s restoration comedy has always seemed less dated and funnier than its contemporaries, but this is unquestionably the best production I’ve seen. Mark Thompson’s design somehow makes the Olivier more intimate. Most of the time, we’re in the Hardcastle’s living room in front of a huge hearth with a welcoming fire. The scene changes are accompanied by delightful jolly choruses and dances and the one from living room to woods and back is a marvel that takes your breath away. The only thing that isn’t in period is modern gestures, but rather than being incongruous they somehow add to the freshness.
City boy Marlow, accompanied by his friend Hastings, is off to the country to meet his intended Kate Hardcastle. Kate’s step-brother Tony Lumpkin convinces them the Hardcastle home is an inn - cue inappropriate behaviour and an outraged Mr Hardcastle. The tongue-tied Marlow has a stumbling meeting with confident Kate where he can’t even look at her, thus enabling Kate to subsequently pose as a barmaid (she stoops to conquer) and see a very different Marlow.
Running in parallel we have the story of Mrs Hardcastle’s niece and her love of Hastings but betrothal to Lumpkin (Mrs Hardcastle’s son by her first marriage, who doesn’t really want marriage), complete with a mix up over a box of jewels. It’s a riot of confusion with city meets country and rich meet poor providing ample opportunity for satire. The humour is broad so the playing is broad, but it manages to stay the right side of OTT. Of course, it all ends happily with both couples united and parents content.
Harry Hadden-Paton is proving equally adept at drama and comedy and here he’s terrific as Marlow. This may be a career high for John Heffernan, equally terrific as Hastings. It’s hard for Katherine Kelly and Cush Jumbo to play against these comic master classes but they do so very well. I assume there is some sort of exchange programme that resulted in Ian McKellern in Coronation Street in exchange for Kelly in this?! Well, she’s been the best thing about Corrie for years (yes, I’m a fan!) and though it was sad to see her go it’s great to see her cutting it in restoration comedy one week later - and there’s something delicious about the former barmaid at the Rovers Return stooping to conquer as a barmaid! Steve Pemberton and Sophie Thompson are great as the Hardcastles, with the latter giving us another of her over-the-top-and-higher-still performances. I was also hugely impressed by David Fynn as Lumpkin. The ensemble is faultlessly cast and impeccably drilled.
A delightful evening from beginning to end. Miss at your peril. - Gareth James
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