Surveying the global political scene this January, it is all too tempting to echo Enver Hoxha’s cheering New Year message to the people of Albania in 1967: “This year will be harder than last year. On the other hand, it will be easier than next year.” But take heart. Without trivialising the external challenges and uncertainties, I am sure there will be much to be enjoyed and celebrated in College life this year.

One uplifting near-term prospect (especially for those in need of light relief after emerging from Collections) comes courtesy of the Trinity Players, who produced The Great Gatsby in the Lodgings garden last summer and will now be performing Richard Sheridan’s 1775 classic The Rivals in the Auditorium on February 2nd and 3rd. Tickets are available here: https://www.ticketsource.co.uk/whats-on/oxford/trinity-college/the-trinity-players-present-the-rivals/e-zkbeyz. To paraphrase the linguistically challenged Mrs Malaprop, I am sure that it will be the pineapple of perfection.

The play is a comedy of manners set in fashionable Bath society, in which romantic deceptions, misunderstandings and threatened duels are ultimately resolved in marriage and reconciliation. It was not, though, an immediate success. The actor John Lee had an apple thrown at him in an early performance and confronted the audience: “By the powers, is it personal? Is it me, or the matter?” Sheridan concluded that it was both. He withdrew the play for ten days, recast Lee and rewrote the script.

The Rivals has long been a favourite of Trinity’s student drama enthusiasts. The Trinity Players began performing in the 1930s, but they were preceded by two Edwardian play-reading societies. The Gargoyle Club was established in 1900 to read the works of Shakespeare “in the following order, which shall be adhered to: comedies, tragedies, historical plays. A play of any other author … may be read once in any term.” The Savoyard Society was created in 1901 “to read the works of English dramatists, preference being given to the works of W. S. Gilbert, which shall be read at alternate meetings”. Both societies read The Rivals in their first few weeks of meetings, showing its appeal to those with a taste for both high drama and frothy light entertainment.

As it happens, I saw a fine production of the play, deftly updated to the 1920s, only last Friday at the Orange Tree Theatre in Richmond, with Patricia Hodge as Mrs Malaprop and Robert Bathurst as the tyrannical Sir Anthony Absolute. Good as it was, I am sure that it will pale in comparison with our home-grown production.

I have had the pleasure of seeing Robert Bathurst perform twice before: in a late-night production of Jeffrey Bernard Is Unwell at the Coach and Horses pub in Soho, and in The Song of Lunch (also set in Soho, something of a pattern…) at the Edinburgh Fringe. Among many television roles, he also played Ed, flatmate of the eponymous Toast of London, in one of my favourite sitcoms. As if this record of thespian achievement were not distinguished enough, Robert also happens to be related to one of my most eminent predecessors as President of Trinity, Ralph Bathurst, who commissioned the building of the current chapel in the early 1690s, among his many other achievements. Robert read law and acted as a student; in the end, jurisprudence’s loss was drama’s gain.