I’d been aware for perhaps a few years that malapropisms are named after a character who’s prone to verbal gaffes. Last night I met Mrs. Malaprop herself at a performance of Richard Brinsley Sheridan’s The Rivals (1775) at nearby Watermill Theatre. This was our second trip to the Watermill, after The Picture of Dorian Gray last September. It’s a small and intimate venue and the production was somewhat in the round, so we were in a row to the left-hand side of the stage. It felt like we were right inside the action, though occasionally one actor would block another such that we couldn’t see the looks passing between them.

It was a small cast of eight actors, four of whom did double duty as servants. We meet two young couples—Lydia Languish and Captain Jack Absolute, with whom she’s fallen in love while he’s in disguise as penniless “Ensign Beverley” – they plan to elope; and Julia Melville and Faulkland, who saved her from drowning and has been her betrothed for years—along with two guardian figures, Sir Anthony Absolute and Mrs. Malaprop, and two hapless suitors played for laughs, country bumpkin Bob Acres and over-the-top-Irish Sir Lucius O’Trigger. The characters’ paths cross in amusing ways while they are all in Bath.

One of the key words in the play is “caprice” – a term you don’t encounter so often these days. (The adjectival form, capricious, is common enough, but I can’t remember the last time I saw the noun.) Several of the characters could be described as capricious, but especially Faulkland, who torments Julia with his doubts about the constancy of her love, and Lydia, who rather loses interest in Captain Jack once she realizes that their guardians approve of their match and she won’t have to undertake a romantic elopement instead.

What with the disguises, misunderstandings, and general farcical atmosphere, The Rivals is reminiscent of a Shakespearean comedy, though the language is easier to follow. Here in Beth Flintoff’s adaptation, much of the humor comes through in accents and exaggerated facial expressions, though Sir Anthony’s growled insults to his son and Bob Acres’ attempts to pass himself off as a gentleman are also highlights. The whole cast (see this full list) was terrific, including several actors familiar from British television and bit parts in films.

And, of course, there’s Mrs. Malaprop and her wondrous malapropisms. Sheridan would have taken her name from malapropos, a synonym for “inappropriate” first recorded in 1630, and an adaptation of the French term mal à propos (“poorly placed”). The first recorded use of “malaprop” for the wrong use of words was by Lord Byron in 1814. Some of the malapropisms in the play fell flat because both the spoken and intended words are too obscure nowadays. I think the director probably left out certain ones, and added at least one anachronistically modern one: “calamari” for calamity. But there were still some excellent ones. Here are a few of my favorites (see also this complete list):

“promise to forget this fellow – to illiterate him, I say, quite from your memory.”

“He is the very pine-apple of politeness!”

“she’s as headstrong as an allegory on the banks of the Nile.”

[I even spotted a malapropism (can I use that term for written rather than spoken words?) on my cornflakes box this morning:

Do you spot it too?]

Great acting, costumes and hairstyles; laughs aplenty; and a rhyming prologue and epilogue that made reference to the modern day (“I’m not going to hex it with jokes about … anything unpleasant!” and “eat less baked beans and drink more champagne”): Altogether a splendid evening out at the theatre.

My rating: