New Vic delivers Broadside with Goldsmith comedy

Published: 31 October 2014
Reporter: Steve Orme

Howard Chadwick as Mr Hardcastle and Gilly Tomlins as Mrs Hardcastle Credit: Nobby Clark

Northern Broadsides relocates Oliver Goldsmith’s period comedy She Stoops to Conquer from the West Country to the north of England for its tour, which stops off at the New Vic, Newcastle-under-Lyme.

Goldsmith's 1773 play is a celebrated story of class, courtship and dysfunctional families. Set against the increasingly chaotic proceedings of one very long night, She Stoops to Conquer is “filled with ludicrous misunderstandings, mischief, mayhem and very big wigs”.

Kate Hardcastle is a young lady fixed up to meet the eligible Marlow with a view to marriage. Marlow is a young gent who is tongue-tied with the upper classes but downright lecherous with commoners. When he is tricked into believing Kate’s ancestral home is a country inn and mistakes Kate for a lowly barmaid, all sorts of things go wrong.

Directed by Conrad Nelson, She Stoops to Conquer features Howard Chadwick and Hannah Edwards, both seen at the New Vic in Bob Eaton’s I Don’t Want to Set the World on Fire! and Jerome Lawrence and Robert E Lee’s Inherit the Wind, Oliver Gomm who was in Dion Boucicault’s The School for Scheming at the Orange Tree Theatre, Richmond, Guy Lewis (Twelfth Night, Open Air Theatre, Regent’s Park); Andrew Price (Northern Broadsides’s 1984), Alan McMahon (Wind in the Willows, Birmingham REP), Lauryn Redding and Andrew Whitehead (Deborah McAndrew’s An August Bank Holiday Lark, a Northern Broadsides and New Vic Theatre co-production), Gilly Tompkins (Rutherford and Son, Northern Broadsides), Jon Trenchard (A Government Inspector, Northern Broadsides) and Robert Took (Don’t Shoot the Messenger, Mikron Theatre).

She Stoops to Conquer runs at the New Vic from Tuesday (4 November) until Saturday 15 November.

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