GREENWICH THEATRE

Talk about scandal. One minute I’m at the theatre enjoying a perfectly respectable piece of Restoration — the next I’m in the depths of Lewisham doing the twist (again) between a woman dressed in a yoga mat and a man in a faux-bearskin loincloth, mixing mojitos for people in bubble-wrap. Theatre is truly transportational.

To explain. Once upon a time I worked at this week’s venue: in the teensy, affable bar, tucked beneath the stairs to the stalls like some hastily-assembled franchise of pre-bedtime children. I spent my quiet shifts leafing through free copies of bad books and wondering how long my post-graduation unemployment-funk would last. Then I’d meander home through the Greenwich foot tunnel, where I was once unsuccessfully mugged by a man wearing a pirate’s outfit. Actually, working at the Greenwich Theatre provided me with the best address I ever had — Cyclops Mews, Homer Drive, Mudchute, Isle of Dogs. A right old postcode odyssey.

The Greenwich Theatre has the munificent, orphans-at-Christmas feel of an old regional venue, which is the first good reason for paying a visit. Because Greenwich doesn’t feel like London. It feels Dickensian and quaint, with its antique market and naval college and (immolated) tea clipper. And how many other fringe venues are only a hop, skim and jet along the Thames? With more transport links than anyone imagines, Greenwich is utterly charming.

Tonight’s performance was The School For Scandal, Sheridan’s corrosively satirical comedy of manners — incidentally one of the first grown-up plays I ever saw. In fact, still have the production script. Inside are the perspicacious scribblings of a flourishing tosspot. For example, ‘Humour — but they don’t laugh?!!’ as if deadpan had been invented circa 1991. Also inscribed for posterity is the dubious assertion that ‘Sarcasm is the god of poetry’. This does not bode well for the memoirs.

The company’s protean actors were also doubling up for tandem performances of Doctor Faustus. Stupendous workload notwithstanding, the direction was devilishly inventive, the production riotously and repeatedly hilarious. Fittingly —or perhaps I was under the influence of Greenwich’s salinity— the theatre stage itself seemed reminiscent of a galleon’s deck.

But is this centuries-old play still sea-worthy? As Mr Garrick’s prologue puts it:

A school for scandal! Tell me, I beseech you,
Needs there a school this modish art to teach you?

The backbiting affectation and fiendish sniping of the 1770s seems very much alive, judging by any newsagent stand’s offerings — Celebrity Mums, Rundown And Unfit! screams Heat’s latest headline. Bitchity bitch-bitch.

Which brings us back to yoga mats and loincloths. As every theatre-going veteran knows, hang around long enough in a post-show bar and you will inevitably be invited in cavalier fashion to a fancy dress party that a friend’s friend of the cast is throwing. The party in this case —jointly hosted by painters and sexual health workers— was replete with hijinks, gossip and drinking songs about STDs, though with mercifully fewer asides. Even Sheridan’s Ofsted-recommended School For Scandal can’t compete with that.