She Stoops to Conquer has enjoyed something of a purple patch across the last half-decade. Leaving aside Jamie Lloyd’s stellar revival at the National in 2012, Pick Me Up Theatre’s latest production is now the second run of Oliver Goldsmith’s mannered farce to grace York’s stages in the space of two years. It is easy to understand its appeal to a budding theatre company largely versed in contemporary musicals but eager to expand its repertoire into the long eighteenth century’s comedy of manners. She Stoops to Conquer circumvents the unhinged amorality of its Restoration forbears and rarely demands the cut-and-thrust dialogue, clockwork timing, and knotty set-pieces of Richard Sheridan’s most popular plays. Moreover, whilst Goldsmith’s play frequently nods its head to the urban cognoscenti who made it a sensation in the 1770s, it rarely extends its own provincial world of country squires and whelps beyond a circumference of four miles diameter, a trick Goldsmith may have gleaned from Laurence Sterne’s Tristram Shandy despite his oft-cited antipathy toward the Yorkshire clergyman. Even the play’s promised dénouement – a pursuit for love across the countryside – is quickly stymied amidst the various sloughs and pitfalls of rural England. Goldsmith thus unfurls his mesh of domestic dramas back where they all began: in the grounds of an idyllic, if ramshackle, country estate. It is therefore a pleasingly simple play to stage: only two brief scenes take place outside the confines of Hardcastle Manor and, as its subtitle ‘the Mistakes of a Night’ suggests, its machinery of increasingly absurd miscommunications is indeed wound up and duly resolved in the space of an evening. Crucially, the play also remains very funny. Its central concerns – decorum all-too-easily masks insolence, social class somehow both is and is not a matter of appearance, and fine sentiments need tempering with stout humour – continue to resonate in a class-conscious culture such as our own.

A précis: She Stoops to Conquer is Goldsmith’s final work and arguably the most successful during his lifetime in terms of the plaudits and money made for its mercurial author. His key text, of course, remains the 1766 novel The Vicar of Wakefield, the printer’s rights for which were famously sold to Francis Newbury to keep Goldsmith out of debtors’ prison. The last few years have, however, seen renewed interest in Goldsmith’s erstwhile celebrated catalogue of plays and poems, and She Stoops to Conquer now appears to have cemented its place within the theatrical canon. Goldsmith’s first play, a 1768 comedy entitled The Good Natur’d Man, gave only a hint of the success that would attend She Stoops to Conquer. It was in some quarters well-received during its day and netted the author a satisfactory £340 in benefits – certainly enough to encourage a further foray – but was very nearly pulled on its opening night after sentimental theatre goers heckled the play’s “damn’d vulgar” third act set amidst a bailiff’s retinue. Perhaps for some it all felt a little too close to home.

Fortunately, it seems that working outside the sentimental theatre à la mode didn’t much deter Goldsmith. He continued to draw much of his own theatrical brio from irreverent Restoration comedies such as George Farquhar’s The Beaux’ Stratagem, a play which clearly prompts She Stoops to Conquer’s central romantic mismatch between gentleman and barmaid. Likewise, two of the play’s neatest comic set-pieces centre on the drunken mishaps of countrymen and servants, Goldsmith ever-willing to mine demotic culture for antic humour and pranks. Indeed, it is much to the credit of director Robert Readman’s production that Sam Baxter’s Tony Lumpkin – arguably Goldsmith’s most vivid creation – is given license to nod and wink his way through the play, constantly implicating the audience in his insolence and tying us up in his schemes. Baxter is this production’s showstopper. He is clearly comfortable with Goldsmith’s rambunctious yet mannered cadences, and manages to fire Readman’s production through its occasional languors. This is no mean feat to pull off. Goldsmith’s message is at bottom quite conservative: Lumpkin’s misrule may make hay within bounds, but ultimately the morning sees youthful ardour subsumed within the social order. As such, Lumpkin must be petulant yet amiable, an agent of (mild) anarchy yet capable of assuming his familial prerogatives by the play’s conclusion. Crucially, he must stay just the right side of obnoxious for his conniving to hold our sympathies, something Baxter seems to have a natural feel for and manages to play right up to the line. It is a spirited yet nuanced central performance and one that suggests that Baxter would be well-suited to the raillery of Restoration comedies such as Congreve’s Way of the World.

She Stoops to Conquer has at its heart a Plautine double-plot of marital intrigue and comings-of-age: the old pass on their ways to the young, learned, fashionable and rustic worlds collide, and social distinctions are temporarily submerged in an elaborate web of romantic intrigues before re-emerging unscathed to assert their priorities. As the play begins, Marlow is on his way to court the daughter of Hardcastle, a parsimonious rural squire whose vain wife holds pretentions of social climbing amidst fashionable London. Meanwhile Tony Lumpkin – Mrs Hardcastle’s son from a previous marriage – is, as he believes, not yet of age and therefore whiles away his evenings singing drunken ditties at the local inn in pursuit of the voluptuous Bet Bouncer. Upon encountering Marlow and his companion Hastings on their way to the Hardcastles’ estate, Lumpkin directs the pair to an ‘inn’ to refresh themselves for the night – that ‘inn’, of course, being Hardcastle manor itself. To confuse matters further, Hastings is himself betrothed to Miss Neville, an orphan ward of the family who Mrs Hardcastle designs to provide a suitable match for her wayward son. At stake is the honour of three families, Miss Neville’s inheritance, and a young single man’s right to drink himself sodden.

If this seems like a rather involved set-up, the appeal of She Stoops to Conquer’s central dramatic irony and class-swapping antics is quite simple. Marlow, a learned gentleman reputed for bashfulness amongst his own class, mistakenly derides his prospective father-in-law’s poor inn-keeping, demands a bill of fare for the evening’s entertainment, and orders his retinue to drink the cellar dry – all to the astonished disbelief of his host. Hardcastle, the bemused squire in question, thus neatly sums up the play’s catachresis of social registers: “this may be modern modesty, but I never saw anything look so like old-fashioned impudence”. Here again, Readman’s production shines. If Mark Hird’s performance seems a touch stilted during the scenes of genuine affection between Hardcastle and his daughter, he enjoys a rare talent for affecting pompous outrage and proves able to spar with his young foil admirably. A particularly vibrant showdown in the latter stages of the play sees the country squire finally shake off his composure to besiege his young tormentor in a makeshift pen of chairs, side tables and candlesticks. Making the most of Goldsmith’s fourth act reveal, this was an inventive set-piece of real brio that drew spontaneous applause from the play’s delighted audience. Furniture flew, taunts were thrown, and for a glorious moment all Hell broke loose. It provided a strong reminder both of the more unruly aspects of Goldsmith’s art and of Pick Me Up’s evident strengths in choreography.

Although this overarching current of controlled riotousness ultimately saves the evening (even managing to absorb an hour’s delay for the opening curtain), it is curious to ponder what sort of play this is and for whom Pick Me Up have staged it. York’s Joseph Rowntree theatre is relatively small and attracts a local audience, perhaps largely seeking an evening of carefree belly-laughs and sentimental romance. That said, I don’t think I was the only one present who relished the production’s more abrasive qualities. She Stoops to Conquer is often critically positioned within the eighteenth century’s school of ‘sentimental comedy’, but this is a label both Goldsmith and his critics at the London Magazine baulked at. The play in fact deals sardonically with saccharine cant by rendering its central protagonist Marlow incapable of expressing polished sentiments to ladies of fashion – ironically on account of an equally fashionable nervous disorder. His forwardness and lust-for-life only reveal themselves in the company of serving women, a quirk exploited by Miss Hardcastle as she assumes the role of tapstress in order to probe his potential as a suitable husband.

Key to this conceit is the scene in which Marlow awkwardly addresses his prospective wife for the first time, ambling his way through a sincere if insipid essay on hypocrisy and double-standards that concludes with the said lady’s wry observation “was there ever such a sober sentimental interview?” It is, unfortunately, one of this production’s weak points. As mentioned previously, Sam Hird otherwise does sterling work as the young Marlow, especially in scenes that showcase his cockiness and bravura. Here, however, he overplays Marlow’s stuttered delivery and spasmodic awkwardness around fashionable women to no great effect. This is an intricate scene and one which demands a nuanced appraisal of the language of sentimentalism, the trick being to allow the audience to understand how Marlow’s man-of-too-much-feeling can still appeal to Miss Hardcastle in spite of his awkward inflections. As Emrys Jones’ recent review of Goodall and Hart’s The Kissing Dance makes clear, Marlow’s allure can be difficult to fathom: a cloistered scholar-cum-sexual-predator, he is also a simpering daddy’s boy who blames others for his own risible treatment of Hardcastle’s hospitality. So Goldsmith doesn’t make things easy, but unfortunately the young cast simply don’t do enough to establish the chemistry between the two lovers that drives the latter half of the play, leaving a slight sense of airlessness just as momentum should be gathering.

There were other problems. Whilst Goldsmith’s play makes few demands on a company’s technical team – and it would of course be churlish to compare Pick Me Up’s set design to that of the National’s – the set was nonetheless an eminently drab affair to look at. Only two meagrely upholstered chairs placed front of stage drew the eye away from an otherwise featureless hodgepodge of dark wooden slats. One might posit that a slightly impoverished set suits a number of Goldsmith’s concerns rather well: Juliet Waters’ Mrs Hardcastle pre-empts the central farce of the play early on by pointing out that the ill-kept house of a parsimonious squire can look “for all the world like an inn”. Likewise, as She Stoops to Conquer arguably continues Goldsmith’s elegy to good rural husbandry begun in his 1770 poem The Deserted Village, the bland homogeneity of both inn and manor house roughly fits his conservative thesis: that the proprietorial and the ruling classes are no longer distinguishable by outward show. Nevertheless this is a slightly charitable argument in defence of an uninspiring set that likely owed more to thrift than vision. Pick Me Up’s minimalist stage also brought with it a few inherent problems in direction that could have quite easily been resolved. To state the obvious, Goldsmith isn’t Beckett: there are few clear stage directions in She Stoops to Conquer’s script and much of the play’s dynamism relies on extended dialogues, paronomastic wordplay, and the vicarious pleasure that comes from watching confused parties discourse at cross-purposes. With a bare stage containing no domestic trappings to frame these sequences, the cast were too often permitted to meander aimlessly across empty space where a few simple furnishings would have provided them with places to rest. The opening scenes between Hardcastle, Miss Neville (Mabel Goulden) and Miss Hardcastle (Stephanie Bolsher) were particularly hamstrung by a lack of any clear structure, and Pick Me Up’s production thus took some time to overcome its early inertia.

But ultimately as their name promised, Pick Me Up did manage to find their stride as Goldsmith’s dual-plots gained pace, enmeshed, and pleasingly resolved themselves in a boisterous fount of goodwill. As a production, it may have lacked sheen and, at times, much shape, but it was nonetheless carried by the good humour of its ensemble cast and the able skill of Baxter, the two Hirds, and Simon Radford as Hastings, all of whom have clearly enjoyed getting to grips with the grandiloquent speechifying, affected outrage, and over-the-top mannerisms that Goldsmith encourages. This was, then, an uneven production, but one containing more hits than misses. If, as appears, She Stoops to Conquer is back with us and here to stay, I can only hope subsequent productions manage to shine as brightly.

She Stoops to Conquer was performed at the Joseph Rowntree Theatre, York, between 21st February and 23rd February 2016.