It's time someone said it loud and clear: Deborah Findlay is an actress of outstanding comic gifts. Following her hilarious bosom-heaving proof that hell hath no fury like an Hispanic woman scorned in The New Menoza at the Gate earlier this year, she can now be seen to wonderful effect in Nigel Hawthorne's agreeable, if less than arresting, production of the Garrick / Colman comedy of 1766, The Clandestine Marriage. In her portrayal here of Miss Sterling � the spoilt,, affected, socially ambitious eldest daughter, of a nouveau riche merchant - she offers a delirious new perspective of what it means to be peeved.
    Her hair a flowering shrub of deranged orange ringlets, her wrists flung back in a frantic stab at modish airs, and her mouth an aggressively rubbery pout, Ms Findlay's Miss Sterling is essentially Violet Elizabeth Bott avant la lettre. "Love and a Cottage! Eh, Fanny!" she flings at her less wordly younger sister (Elizabeth Chadwick). "Ah, give me indifference a coach and six."
    Instead of screaming till she is sick, this overgrown 'ickle girl goes in for the pettish elephant-stampede-on-the-Spot. A mesmerising mix of cupidity and stupidity, Ms Findlay brings to the role a mad intensity that makes Ms Sterling seem at once fixated and totally unfixed.
    The best scenes in the production are those she shares with her like-minded aunt, Mrs Heidelberg, brilliantly incarnated by Susan Engel as an imperious crone, whose pursed old lips are a sort of ghastly mangling machine whereby words that go in English come out quite deformed with constipated fashionability. The energy level when this pair are off feels mildly depressed, for The Clandestine Marriage is the kind of Georgian comedy where compulsory good spirits pre-empt any very biting look at the class friction between the titled-but-hard-up and the well-off climbers. A particular casualty in this regard is Sir John Melvil (Simon Chandler) who, squelchily operating against type, agrees to accept a smaller dowry to get his hands on the sister he fancies.
    The sense of escapism is reduced here by some nice touches, like the strong suggestion, hinted at in the text, that Fanny is already pregnant by her good but unmarriageably impecunious sweetheart Lovewell (Jonathan Cullen). This certainly makes the need for a resolution more pressing, an outcome that the beefy, booming money-mindedness of her merchant father Sterling (Christopher Benjamin) looks set to thwart.
    But the, play keeps winking at you that geniality will win the day. Nigel Hawthorne's amusingly decrepit roue Lord Ogleby, whose desire to cut a laddish swagger is more than a little compromised by chronic rheumatism, feels uncomfortably like an instance of the drama having it both ways; he's a deluded old fop who turns out to have a convenient capacity for comedy-resolving good sense. Like the greenery in the outdoor moments, which drolly keeps switching position, courtesy of some herbaceously clad scene-shifters, it comes across as a case of (literally) hedging bets.