Year: 1985
Title of the play: The Critic
Author: Richard Brinsley Sheridan
Director: Sheila Hancock
Others in the Cast: Roy Kinnear, Selina Cadell, Greg Hicks, Claire Moore, Eleanor Bron, Jonathan Hyde, Ian McKellen, Stephen MacDonald, Laurance Rudic, Simon Dutton, Tristram Wymark, Hugh Lloyd, Claire Moore, Julie Legrand
Company/Event: National Theatre Company Ian McKellen-Edward Petherbridge Group
Theatre and location: Olivier Theatre, London
Other productions of the same play: 1986 -
Odéon-Théâtre de l’Europe, Paris International Theatre Festival, Blackstone
Theatre, Chicago
Plot summary: A burlesque on stage acting and play production conventions. One of its major roles, Sir Fretful Plagiary, is a comment on the vanity of authors and in particular a caricature of the dramatist Richard Cumberland. Based on George Villiers' The Rehearsal, it concerns misadventures that arise when an author, Mr Puff, invites Sir Fretful Plagiary and the theatre critics Dangle and Sneer to a rehearsal of his play The Spanish Armada, Sheridan's parody of the then fashionable tragic drama.
Peth’s role: Sir Fretful Plagiary
Reviews: McKellen is Mr. Puff, a hyperkinetic and vaguely Celtic specialist in
panegyric, which is to say, a forerunner of the modern public relations man.
From touting others, he has turned to writing his own epic tragedy, The Spanish
Armada. At a rehearsal, everything goes wrong. The actors drop whole swatches
of dialogue as turgid and unplayable. The bit players upstage the leads, who
swat them. A sword fight is a model of slapstick ineptitude. A Minister of
State (Petherbridge) comes out, stares at the audience long and balefully, and
departs; he is, Mr. Puff explains, contemplating politics but discreetly not
discussing it. William A. Henry III. Time, May. 26, 1986
Production details: Here
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