Richard Brinsley Sheridan’s The School For Scandal, first performed in 1777, reveals that humans have changed little over the centuries, clothing and make-up aside. Sheridan's deliciously despicable characters would slip perfectly into the 21st-century world of gossip blogs, truthiness, and schadenfreude-as-blood sport.
The play's plot is thinner than thin, but the characters are full-throated, puffed-up, and blissfully cartoony. Take Mrs. Candour, about whom it is said, "...whenever I hear the current running against the characters of my friends, I never think them in such danger as when Candour undertakes their defense." As perfectly embodied by Dana Ivy, Mrs. Candour lives up to a description from the The Sweet Smell of Success: "a cookie full of arsenic." Not only could I see her holding court at 21 in that film, but I can also picture her keeping a Sunday brunch full of gay men in delighted hysterics for hours.
