In season 16 of RuPaul’s Drag Race, the famously fair-but-harsh judge Michelle Visage compliments Nymphia Wind on her Marie-Antoinette delicately crafted fan-nails, before once and for all voting off the eighteenth-century figure from the show: “To be literally honest, if I never see another Marie-Antoinette look in this runway, nobody will be happier than me.” The art of drag, with its wigs, lace, padding and rouge, is so heavily inspired by eighteenth-century fashion that the queen of frivolity is now considered a drag icon in her own right.

This summer, on the deep thrust stage of the Swan theatre at the RSC, something of the spirit of RuPaul was felt. Together with a Bridgerton-esque colour palette and the consumate art of “shade” (the art of wittily offending), high drag fashion and ball culture provided the core inspiration for Tinuke Craig’s opulent vision of The School for Scandal by Richard B. Sheridan, famously no stranger to scandal himself. From Alex Lowde’s shocking pink costumes to the projected stage directions “House of …” to help the audience navigate the convoluted plot, Craig’s vision is designed to give the modern audience a good run for their money. Eighteenth-century scholars longing to see the stage energy of their familiar plays found that, as the expression goes, “the library was open”.

Unstaged at the RSC for more than 25 years, The School for Scandal was given the fresh new take it deserved, showcasing the comedy of manner’s balance of sparkling wit and delightful cruelty that is so rare to come by. The director rightfully chooses to emphasise the text’s playfulness with a sense of fun that was equally felt by Helen Dallas in her previous review here. Sofas appear magically, actors pop up like automatons from a music box, wit cracks like a whip, cake-like dresses get stuck in doorways. Live music composed exclusively for the play by director Ellie Verkerk paces the action. Suibhan Harrison’s Lady Sneerwell (whose delivery of the prologue, as noted by Dallas, creates an uneasy familiarity with the audience right from the start) and Tadeo Martinez’ Snake form the perfect duo of villains, whose charisma challenges the ostensible moral of the epilogue delivered by the demure, though ultimately dull Maria (Yasemin Özdemir). A delighted audience responds enthusiastically to this invitation for a bit of summer frisson.

Sheridan’s words fizz through the air, crafting true comic gems magnified by mise-en-scène, such as when an angelic light is shed on Stefan Adegbola (the hypocrite Joseph Surface) as he delivers his insincere nuggets of wisdom. While the text’s antisemitism is simply elided (Moses the money-lender becomes “Morehouse”), delicate tweaks to the text intelligently shine light on the 18th-century comedy’s otherwise tacit reliance on colonial exploitation, as also noted by Dallas in her review. These minimal additions (such as Sir Oliver Surface’s “very moral” business in the East Indies, said with a wink) clarify, with the lightest of touches, the horror lurking behind the glamour of eighteenth-century fashionable salons: a model approach for subsequent productions.

Cultivating a delightful sense of a “guilty pleasure” appropriate to the play’s theme of gossip, Craig’s vision celebrates witty repartee and elaborate schemes. In this performance, the stage is saturated with pink and black, and the formalist obsession with artifice, which brings forward the formulaic nature of comedies of manners in general, sometimes comes at the expense of the characters’ life and complexity. What makes drag – and Sofia Coppola’s Marie Antoinette, another key inspiration –a moving form of expression is the combination of sass and vulnerability, of cruelty and kindness, a balance Craig’s production could have struck more consistently although Dallas recognises an effort to breathe life into characters that are too often read as two-dimensional.

If we are to believe Maria’s epilogue, the social role of gossip is overall destructive. But in an age when fake news is rampant, conspicuous consumption thrives and self-presentation are the obsession, the production successfully exposes the paradox that exposing oneself is also a social necessity. In this respect, Craig offers us a nuanced commentary that will help draw attention on more underrated texts.