Dandy Dick, Theatre Royal, Brighton, review The playwright Sir Arthur Wing Pinero was a contemporary of Oscar Wilde and Bernard Shaw. In his time, his fame was the equal of theirs, though his reputation has not proved as durable. He wrote his farce, Dandy Dick, in Brighton, so it is an appropriate choice for the inaugural production of the new company, Theatre Royal Brighton Productions. The curtain rises on a Victorian drawing-room, where two sprightly Misses, Salome and Sheba Jedd, are plotting to creep out and join a couple of young Army officers at a fancy-dress ball. Meanwhile their father, the saintly Dean Augustin Jedd, is agonisingly trapped between his horror of gambling, his urgent need for £1,000 for the church restoration fund, and a hot tip on a horse (the Dandy Dick of the title) proffered by his racy widowed sister, Georgina, who part-owns the nag. For the production team, there must have been the faintest inclination to update Pinero's play - to set it, perhaps, in some inner-city deanery where the temptations that lure the Dean and his daughters might seem as ominous now as gambling and unchaperoned dancing did in 1887. But perish the thought! The play must stand on its merits, and that is how Christopher Luscombe directs it, with Florence Andrews and Jennifer Rhodes in their pastel gowns, gallantly attended by Peter Sandys-Clarke and Charles de Bromhead as their dim swains. John Arthur as the butler, Blore, channels the Rocky Horror Show's riff-raff to comic effect, but Nicholas le Prevost, as the Dean, doesn't quite convey his character's conflict of virtue and cupidity. The energy picks up as soon as Patricia Hodge appears as the disreputable horsewoman, Georgiana, and improves further in the second act, when she is joined by Matt Weyland as the irascible policeman Noah Topping, and Rachel Lumberg as his dutiful but devious wife. It is featherlight stuff, but still, this is an evening of considerable charm.