A backstage farce

The National's comedy double bill of She Stoops to Conquer and A Laughing Matter reminds us what British theatre owes to Garrick, says Paul Taylor

It's every artistic director's nightmare – that the defining play of the era will land in your in-tray and that you will either fail to recognise its merits or reject it. Rumours abound of luminaries who turned their noses up at the likes of Angels in America, My Night with Reg and The Lieutenant of Inishmore.

It can happen to the best of people. The English theatre is hugely indebted to David Garrick, the legendary actor-manager who replaced egomanical declamation with emotional truth and with responsiveness to co-stars, who reformed sloppy backstage practices, and who raised the profession to a new social acceptability. There is, however, a blot on his record. The greatest actor of his age intriguingly failed to snap up for Drury Lane the one great comedy to come along in his time: Oliver Goldsmith's She Stoops to Conquer. It was premiered, instead, at the rival venue, Covent Garden.

The circumstances of his sin of omission provide the subject of A Laughing Matter, the exuberant, shrewd, highly entertaining new play by April de Angelis. This specially commissioned work forms the companion piece to a robust revival of Goldsmith's contentious comedy, both beautifully directed by Max Stafford-Clark with the same first-rate, ebullient cast.

In an earlier piece, Playhouse Creatures, De Angelis focused on the sensational phenomenon of actresses on the Restoration stage (a freedom for females that she showed was not without its drawbacks). A Laughing Matter is similarly alert to the sociological shifts of theatre history, while wryly pinpointing the perennial factors that make theatre a conservative culture more hospitable to classic revivals than to new writing.

Here, Garrick's desire to make acting and the theatre respectable is seen in the light of its ambiguous results. The cost of dignifying the art form and of keeping the Lord Chamberlain off your back is surely too high if it makes you afraid to touch a challenging play about class and courtship such as She Stoops because it has low-life scenes and a well-bred heroine who slums it in the disguise of a barmaid to win the man she loves. In De Angelis's version, Garrick turns Goldsmith down in favour of putting on The Fashionable Lover, by the Reverend Richard Cumberland, a genteel sentimental confection of the kind then in vogue.

A Laughing Matter rejoices in some hilarious scenes set at the Turk's Head club presided over by Goldsmith's champion, Dr Johnson, and backstage at Drury Lane. My favourite line of the year was uttered by a bare-arsed actor haplessly trying to find his costume: "I can't go on without my lucky tights, Mr Garrick." A thread of sadness weaves through these high-spirited farce sequences. The need for respectability has also prevented Jason Watkins's wonderfully winning Garrick from ever acknowledging that he is the father of his young protégé Cautherley (performed with a lovely charm by Stephen Beresford). Out of misplaced solicitude, he won't let him play Goldsmith's vulgar Tony Lumpkin, a disappointment that ironically contributes to Cautherley's decision to leave the profession. Throughout the mayhem of the final scene, there is the immensely touching counter-tug of the pain of the unspoken between father and son and the quiet desolation of Garrick's being left without an heir.

Freshly contextualised by A Laughing Matter, the revival of She Stoops to Conquer comes over with its abrasive vitality reinvigorated and its autobiographical elements thought-provokingly highlighted by having the bolshie-adolescent Lumpkin played by the same terrific actor (Owen Sharpe) who, in De Angelis's piece, makes Oliver Goldsmith such a memorably chaotic figure. A dream of a dramatic diptych.

In rep to March (020-7452 3000)