BBC Play of the Month (TV Series) The Critic (1982) User Reviews

Great Restoration Comedy

[mikehdtv · 10/10 · 18 April 2015]

If you like restoration comedy you'll love this behind-the-scenes look at the restoration theater. This BBC production has a stellar cast but is not commercially available. During the early 80's when this was made the BBC would routinely reuse video tapes or just lose them. Not sure if the master for this still exists. There is a full domestic VCR transcription on YouTube that's well worth a watch. As well as consummate performers like Alan Badel (Sir Fretful Plagiary) this production also features Hogwood's Academy of Ancient Music plus some of the finest baroque vocalists of the era.

The Critic: or, a Tragedy Rehearsed is a satire by Richard Brinsley Sheridan. It was first staged at Drury Lane Theater in 1779. It is a burlesque on stage acting and play production conventions, and Sheridan considered the first act to be his finest piece of writing. 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 who was a contemporary of Sheridan.

Based on George Villiers' The Rehearsal, it concerns misadventures that arise when an author, Mr Puff, invites Sir Fretful Plagiary and the theater critics Dangle and Sneer to a rehearsal of his play The Spanish Armada, Sheridan's parody of the then-fashionable tragic drama. This BBC production omits Sir Fretful from the rehearsal group but includes him in a breakfast scene.

Highly recommended!

"Nothing in the history of the theater has ever been perfect"

[boblipton · 6/10 · 7 May 2021]

A new play is scheduled, but Richard Brinsley Sheridan hasn't written it yet, so his company locks him in his room with a bottle of claret, paper, pen and ink, and won't let him out until it is finished. We then see the play performed.

THE CRITIC was Sheridan's sixth play, a rewrite of 1672's THE REHEARSAL, which was originally published anonymously, but has been pretty well settled as being a collaboration between George Villiers and one or more other individuals: possibly Samuel Butler, Martin Clifford and Thomas Sprat. It was a satire aimed at Dryden. In Sheridan's rewrite, the author is a liar and a fool, convinced of his own genius, who excuses his frequent theft of lines from Shakespeare and other sources as "two men have the same thought". The action takes place during a dress rehearsal in which the author, played by Thomas Hywell, explains all the artificialities as standards of the stage, and his friends marvel at their "contrivance".

Don Taylor's rewrite and staging of the play is an excellent one, with Academy of Ancient Music under Christopher Hogwood playing selections of Restoration music, but it is, as offered, one of Sheridan's lesser works. Its satire works in the older manner, making fun of a target that cannot fight back. While those of us who have studied drama and literature of this era may find a great deal of pleasure in its careful staging and superior performers (including John Gielgud and Nigel Hawthorne), trying to gain some pleasure in the antique rivalries that produced it is like studying entomology by looking at bugs in amber. The fun is far more ill-humored than in works like THE SCHOOL FOR SCANDAL or THE RIVALS.