‘School’ Director Sees Lessons for 1980s in 1700s Play

The London pallor in his face matched the gray of his faded corduroy jacket. In his hand he gripped a black attache case. British director Paul Marcus did not look like someone made for Southern California. He doesn’t even drive.

Yet his tour de farce staging of “The School for Scandal,” which opened Friday on the Mainstage at South Coast Repertory in Costa Mesa, bears the earmarks of a director with a high-octane style more tuned in to California than he is. Indeed, anyone who can inject a rock number into the third act of Richard Brinsley Sheridan’s 18th-Century comedy of manners may well have ancestors here.

“We’ve not changed a single lyric,” Marcus said, clearly compelled to make a defense. “Sheridan’s song is about booze and women. It’s a young man’s song. Very vibrant. It would probably have been a lusty ballad in the original. It struck me that rock ‘n’ roll is a very direct approximation.”

That is only the half of what struck the 34-year-old, Oxford-educated director.

Among other campy brainstorms, Marcus has the parvenu heroine of the play, Lady Teazle, dolled up as a born-to-shop blonde in a punkish “hedgehog” hairdo; a footman named Trip played as a black hipster in sunglasses; a sleazy journalist named Snake done as a leather-suited paparazzo; and a pair of gossip-mongers named Sir Benjamin Backbite and Crabtree tarted up as two froufrou Popsicles.

“I try to inform about character,” said Marcus, crediting his chief collaborators--costume designer Shigeru Yaji and set designer Cliff Faulkner--with highlighting “the correspondences” between Sheridan’s satirical comedy, first produced in London in 1777, and contemporary society.

“That’s why anything you can give the actors as a resource that hasn’t to do with spelling out--which would insult the audience’s intelligence--is something that adds dimension and detail. Detail really is the key.”

Initially, South Coast Rep’s artistic directors David Emmes and Martin Benson intended to do a Restoration comedy, he said. About a year ago, on a play-scouting trip to London, they invited him to suggest titles from the Restoration--mid- to late-17th Century--that he might like to stage as a guest director at South Coast Rep.

Marcus, whose theatrical background includes directing shoestring productions in London’s Covent Garden and producing and directing commercial fare in the West End, decided to overshoot the mark by about 100 years.

“I love Restoration comedy, but the language is incredibly hard,” he explained, easing into a seat at a delicatessen in Costa Mesa. “I also feel strongly about Restoration that its day has come and gone again. In the 1960s, all that sexual licentiousness--literally, the unlacing of corsets--and all that hedonism after a period of puritanism seemed very current.”

On the other hand, “The School for Scandal,” which made Sheridan’s career, “is a very ‘80s play,” he said. “It is about appearances and scandal sheets and the way people want to be perceived. It has to do, to a certain extent, with hypocrisy. Which makes it seem very contemporary.”

With Marcus was his wife, Viviana. Married last May, they met three years ago at the Royal Shakespeare Company, where he was working as an assistant director and she was working in the marketing department. Today, they both have jobs at the British Broadcasting Co., he as a script editor and she in sales.

“The RSC was a tremendous experience,” Marcus said. “You learn a lot from actors who are making an effort together in a large company across a season. Shakespeare still, as far as I’m concerned, presents you with an infinity of choices.”

With three weeks of “Scandal” rehearsals and several previews behind him, Marcus was full of praise for the technical prowess of the actors at South Coast Rep. But technique was not his paramount concern in casting the play, he said.

The crucial factor was “hearing an immediate connection between the words I’ve been reading on the page and somebody who is in front of me speaking them,” he said. Because Sheridan represents a certain sophistication of language, actors lacking a solid base of technique would be hard-pressed to seem spontaneous.

“What I didn’t want,” Marcus said, “was somebody who was going to give me a very arch, preconceived idea about Sheridan as a stylized writer. What’s wonderful about him is that he’s written to be spoken. Sheridan is a very practical playwright.

“My strong feeling is that for a lot of young men of a certain social class in Sheridan’s day, the theater must have had the same lure as the music business or the film industry or television does today.”

Asked to compare how British and American actors attack the classics, Marcus was reluctant to generalize on the basis of his experience with one production here. Still, he couldn’t help noticing that “American actors ask more questions, on average, which have to do with defining character.”

“It’s not a matter of insecurity,” he added. “I think it may just be an approach that has to do with taking hold of an overall silhouette, an outline they want, so they can flesh it out.”

Moreover, the projection of correct British speech, for which American actors are often taken to task in the classics, never presented a problem, he said.

In “Scandal,” Marcus decided to delineate social rank with varying degrees of both English and American accents. Thus, characters of high pretension speak in the haughty tones of the British upper class while those trying to shed their pretension (or those of lower rank) deliver their lines in deliberately common accents that echo the streets of Brooklyn, Dublin and Harlem.

“It’s like Mick Jagger putting on a working-class accent when he first gave interviews,” Marcus said, “whereas for the characters in the upper-middle-class spectrum we ended up with a kind of mid-Atlantic American diction. I don’t like that term, but it defines reasonably well a kind of Anglicized but very conscious American speech.”

Unlike many directors, Marcus never had acting ambitions. He said he simply decided at age 16, after two years of intense theatergoing, that he wanted to put on plays because he was fascinated by “how the spectacle and vision was arrived at.”

His theatrical impulse more or less coincided with the sudden success of his father, Frank Marcus, a Sunday playwright who scored a hit with “The Killing of Sister George” in 1965. (It enabled his father to give up a job in an antique store to become a full-time writer.)

It was at Oxford University that Marcus got his first chance to direct. He made the most of it, he said, by mounting ambitious and expensive productions that he knew he wouldn’t get the chance to do professionally: Goethe’s “Faust,” Tennessee Williams’ “Camino Real,” “The Bacchae” by Euripides.

“There was no drama course at Oxford,” he said. “Indeed, there are few at any English university. But the good thing about doing drama at Oxford is you occasionally get reviewed by the national critics. I had a little bit of notice that way.”

After graduation in 1976, Marcus headed straight for Covent Garden, where he ran a fringe theater called the Rock Garden Cafe. His first production in 1977, “Mahogany,” by Brecht and Weill, cost 300 pounds to mount with a cast of seven players and an orchestra of nine musicians.

“Everybody worked for nothing virtually,” he said.

The theater seated only 30 people. But the production caused such a stir, he said, “we ended up with 120 people in the house and 50 a day being turned away.” The show was transferred to the legendary Mermaid Theater, thus launching his career.

Since then Marcus has produced or directed scores of shows in and around London at the Salisbury Playhouse, the New End Theatre, the Roundhouse, the Royal Academy of Dramatic Art, the Young Vic.

At the BBC, where he has been for two years, his script editing projects have included Simon Gray’s “Quartermaine’s Terms,” among other television productions. He is producing David Hare’s “Knuckle” there.

Which meant that Marcus would be flying back to London the night after “Scandal” opened at South Coast Rep. “I really don’t like to leave a production so soon,” he said, shrugging his shoulders. “But unless you’re attached to the theater you’re working in, it’s a director’s occupational hazard.”

The waitress arrived with the check. Marcus gripped his black attache case once again.

“My Linus blanket,” he said. “It has the production script.”

Exeunt.

“The School for Scandal” by Richard Brinsley Sheridan continues through May 29 at South Coast Repertory, 655 Town Center Drive, Costa Mesa. Show times: 8 p.m. Tuesdays through Fridays; 2:30 and 8 p.m. Saturdays; 2:30 and 7:30 p.m. Sundays. Tickets: $18 to $25. Information: (714) 957-4033.