The Rivals, Theatre Royal, Haymarket

“Suicide, parricide and salivation!” Not the ecstasies of a masochist, but the mangled verbal fanfare announcing that The Rivals – Richard Brinsley Sheridan’s classic comedy of manners – is once again a fixture in London’s West End. When it comes to powerhouse comedic casting, the National Theatre has long had the laurels for 2010 sewn up in Simon Russell Beale’s voluminous britches. Partnered by Fiona Shaw in Dion Boucicault’s London Assurance, the pair were mighty indeed. Now, in the dying breaths of the year, we have Penelope Keith and Peter Bowles reunited in two much-beloved comedy roles. So does their Rivals live up to its name and challenge for comedic supremacy?

In a word, no. Solid, and occasionally even nuanced, this new production has its merits certainly, but fails to generate that peculiarly anarchic delight that is such comedy at its best.

Sheridan’s spun-sugar artifice of a plot upturns convention, tracing the affections of two young lovers (the descriptively named Captain Jack Absolute and Lydia Languish) thwarted by no greater evils than mutual fortune, good looks and their friends’ consent. By turns chaperoning and masterminding the romantic process are two elderly monsters: Jack’s autocratic father Sir Anthony and Lydia’s benign but verbally misguided aunt Mrs Malaprop.

Simon Higlett’s set and Christopher Woods’ costumes place us squarely in the fashionable 18th-century Bath of Sheridan’s creation, a world in which education for women is not a concept for polite society, where circulating libraries and the novels they provide are “an evergreen tree of diabolical knowledge”. A crescent of Bath limestone houses curves itself around the action, while an ordered clutter of chaises longues and armchairs occupies the foreground, ready for the intrigues of the aggressively wigged and corseted cast. Though elegant in its simplicity, it is hard not to crave a little more visual excitement or at least contrast, to mirror a plot that makes the perilous journey from drawing room to duelling field and back again.

Peter Hall’s direction suffers from a similar lack of animation. The visual tics and twitches – conversations that “end” multiple times, with participants crossing repeatedly to and fro to break up passages of dialogue; patterns of physical humour – reflect Sheridan’s text but do little to supplement it. Only in the characterisation does the production occasionally surprise.

Leading the cast with deliciously barmy patriarchal authority is Peter Bowles as Sir Anthony (pictured right). His cooing, caressing malevolence (“I am compliance itself when I am not thwarted. No one more easily led when I have my own way”) is balanced by outbursts of warped pleasure, but all takes place over a bubbling current of madness that periodically threatens to burst forth in his attacks of “phrenzy”. His quiet menace is an unexpected take on Absolute’s parenting style, gaining in suggestion what it lacks in outward excess.

Understatement is a less comfortable fit for Penelope Keith’s Mrs Malaprop. Blessed with the play’s choicest lines (the “allegory on the banks of the Nile” will never grow old) she’s a figure who is little more than dialogue, an absence that is not entirely addressed by Keith’s resolutely moderate characterisation. In rejecting the pantomime element she loses the part’s warmth and energy, though this is to some degree balanced by an uncharacteristic vulnerability that comes into its own in the closing scene, leaving one to hope that she does eventually persuade Sir Anthony to “perforate [her] mystery”.

Among the young lovers, both Tam Williams (Jack) and Tony Gardner as Jack’s friend Faulkland (a vision in Aubergine silk) charm. Williams’s puppyish hero oozes uncomplicated PG appeal – an 18th-century Jack Wills advertisement personified – and is countered by quite the most deliciously phlegmatic Faulkland imaginable, his fits of jealousy a laboured chore to be undertaken with one cynical eye always to the audience.

Annabel Scholey’s Julia is likewise deftly managed, balancing tenderness and pert energy. Addison’s Lydia however (though undeniably and decoratively languishing) feels rather too stagy against the naturalism of both Scholey and Gardner; her occasionally unyielding vocal pitch and consciously projected speech at times interrupts the flow of dialogue, shifting attention from witty dramatic product to laboured actorly process.

As festive outings go there’s little on the pantomime scene to rival the smile and stab of Sheridan’s dialogue, or the touchingly absurd comedy of his “old weather-beaten she-dragon” of an anti-heroine. Doubtless this production will win new fans and admirers for the play, but those returning to visit an old friend might just find it a little less quick on its feet than they remember.

• The Rivals is at the Theatre Royal Haymarket until 26 February, 2011
• Find Richard Brinsley Sheridan on Amazon