Review: 'The School for Scandal' Where: Pittsburgh Irish & Classical Theatre, Charity Randall Theatre, Stephen Foster Memorial, Oakland. When: Through June 24; Wed.-Sat. 8 p.m.; Sun. 2 p.m.; also June 24, 2 p.m. Tickets: $15-$30; 412-394-3353.

Don't let the glitter of the surface blind you to the tremors within. Pittsburgh Irish & Classical Theatre's opulent and ultimately very funny production of "The School for Scandal" may seem just another period comedy for the "Masterpiece Theatre" crowd, a costume-rich antidote to the pungent fables of Martin McDonagh's "Pillowman," PICT's previous show. But it is as political in its implications as the latest play by David Hare.

Of course, it's not possible for us to experience Richard Brinsley Sheridan's comedy with the excitement of its first audiences, who saw it in the political and intellectual context that fueled both the American Revolution and the greater cataclysm of the French. Today, I suppose it's just too famous to feel new, trapped in its role as one of the masterpieces of an English comic tradition that runs from Congreve to Goldsmith to Wilde.

But consider that Sheridan and those other three playwrights came from the Anglo-Irish ascendancy, a social class very aware of the charged interplay between established social forms and the destabilizing energies of a society in transition. Granted, today we don't instinctively "know" the rigid class boundaries of that society. But "The School for Scandal" dramatizes a distrust of social conventions that is a critique of the establishment as potentially revolutionary in English society as Beaumarchais' "Marriage of Figaro" was in the French.

The chief target of Sheridan's satire is the manipulation of moral poses for amatory, financial and social advantage -- and, by extension, political. The showy profession of "sensibility," what we would call sentiment, had become a public display of morality, an excuse, amid self-dramatizers on stage as well as in society, for self-interest. And that's exactly what gives "The School for Scandal" contemporary kick."Morality," we might join Sheridan in saying, has become the last refuge of a scoundrel. Or come to think of it, perhaps I mean the first refuge.

Basically, there are two interlocking stories. One concerns two brothers, the ostentatiously moral Joseph Surface and his scapegrace brother, Charles, both seeking the hand of the wealthy Maria and the favor of a wealthy uncle, Sir Oliver. The other concerns young Lady Teazle. Restive in her new marriage to the shy, cantankerous and much older Sir Peter, she has started to run with a group of inveterate gossips, the scandal-mongers of the title.

In both stories, there's a need to distinguish true worth. The gossiping crew claims to act in the interest of public morality by exposing private deviance, but actually they're motivated by a prurience and self-interest similar to the self-promotion that underlie Joseph's pious platitudes. All, in fact, are hypocrites, and Sir Oliver, Sir Peter and Lady Teazle and we the audience all have to see through such pretense and also overcome any similar tendencies in ourselves.

After all, who is it who gives power to politicians cloaked in professions of morality? And who feeds the celebrity gossip industry, with its manifestations in an obsessively trivializing media?

But as I say, for anyone uninterested in Sheridan's more serious purpose, "The School for Scandal" has plenty to entertain -- although it does take a long time to get going. The playwright is so solicitous of the audience that he spends pretty much the whole first act setting us up for the comic explosions and reversals of the second.

Are we dolts? Would that he had trusted us more. But maybe he's right. You can't argue with the play's success, just wish that it could be achieved more expeditiously.

Director Andrew Paul gains some speed through Julie Ray's flexible set, which gives the appearance of period substance through a series of easily movable screens (another comment on the surface/substance paradox). I'm less enamored of his device of having Charles' roistering friends act out his family portraits, but the empty frames that gradually pile up are certainly telling.

There are many performers to honor, but chiefly, Matt Gaydos as the poseur, Joseph. His every pause is scrupulously noted; it's continuously funny to see calculation play across his face. But he also betrays a dark bitterness. The combination makes for very high and telling comedy.

On the other side is Douglas Rees' bewildered, unhappy Sir Peter, who gradually fights through his own misanthropy to discover the fun of life. Perhaps the best single bit of business in the play is his expression as he discovers and employs an unlikely hiding place in a trunk. As his erring wife, Vanessa Mandeville Morosco is very forceful, but perhaps too sophisticated to have been country-bred; she might show, earlier in the play, more of the sympathy that justifies her eventual reclamation.

Sir Peter's antithesis is Sir Oliver, played with robust humor by Martin Giles, dressed in Joan Markert's deliciously florid Oriental garb. Oliver represents an old English virtue, a bluff pragmatism and entrepreneurial energy which are, however, busy conquering the world. His parallel in the younger generation is Joel Ripka's Charles, quickly throwing off the escapades of youth.

There's solid support on every hand. Sheila McKenna takes that rattlebag Mrs. Candour and gives her ferocious energy, multiplying her machine-gun speech with the eloquent and commanding use of a click-clicking fan. Marni Penning has Lady Sneerwell's bitchy comedy down pat, but her passions run rather overboard. Brian Barefoot has a showy double as the oily Snake and the dithering booby, Backbite. And what can one say about Roger Jerome as Crabtree, except that it is evidence of PICT's maturity to have such a pro fill such a middling important role?

The several plots come to a satisfactory conclusion, of course, with Sir Oliver's money rescuing Charles and making possible the appropriate marriage. Of course, that fortune was extracted from India, and Oliver does for Charles just what India was already starting to do, soon to replace America in the balance sheet of world exploitation.

The personal always has roots in the political -- and vice versa.