WHY would you revive a play with a title to make Viz readers snigger, written in Brighton 125 years ago by an exotically named playwright who has slipped off the radar?

“We’re thrilled to be staging Arthur Wing Pinero’s Dandy Dick, a glorious British comedy from 1887, as the first production for Theatre Royal Brighton Productions’ opening season,” says artistic director Christopher Luscombe, whose touring show visits the Grand Opera House, York, from next Tuesday for a week en route to the West End.

“My dream is to find plays like this: classic comedies that have not been done for years but need to be seen again.”

“I found this one in a secondhand bookshop in Richmond [the Surrey version, not North Yorkshire]. I’d always been on the lookout for it because I love his play The Magistrate and had considered directing that one, but then I’d thought about the three in a row he wrote for the Court on Sloane Square in his 20s: The Schoolmistress, The Magistrate, and Dandy Dick.

“I looked at all three, and my feeling is that The Schoolmistress is really rooted in its age with characters we don’t quite relate to – and the school mistress disappears from the play for the main part of it.

“What gives Dandy Dick the edge, and the primary reason for choosing it, is that it really made me laugh. Like PG Wodehouse, Pinero has creatred a world, a comic vision, that’s very attractive and I wanted to explore it.””

Best remembered for the 1935 film starring Will Hay and last taken around the country in 1987 by Sir Anthony Quayle and Margaret Courtenay, Dandy Dick tells the story of country vicar the Very Reverend Augustin Jedd, a pillar of Victorian respectability, who preaches regularly against the evils of horseracing and gambling.

Played by Nicholas Le Prevost on the 2012 tour, he becomes caught up in horse-doping after a visit from his tearaway sister, Georgiana (Patricia Hodge) leads him to risk all at the races, much against his better judgement.

Luscombe is not only directing this revival but has adapted Pinero’s script too. “I read it and re-read it and some of it shows its age, so I’ve tried to do what I hope is an affectionate edit. I wanted dialogue that feels vibrant and funny,” says Christopher, who removed references that he considered to be too obscure.

He has previous form for displaying impeccable judgement when revitalising old chestnuts, such as his productions of The Comedy Of Errors and The Merry Wives Of Windsor for Shakespeare’s Globe in 2006 and 2008. “I took only three phrases out of Comedy Of Errors, which was a perfect comedy, but I cut half an hour out of Merry Wives without telling anyone and I don’t think anyone noticed it at the time!” Christopher recalls.

Pruning the text holds no fears for him. “I’ve directed five Alan Bennett plays and he always says it’s a director’s job to cut it,” he says. “I have an instinct for what I feel can go.

“For Dandy Dick, you edit the text for this show, this cast, make it custom-built for this production, rather than just dashing off the old piece.”

Pinero has his place in British theatre as the first playwright to be knighted – and only the second man of the theatre, after Arthur Sullivan – yet even by the end of his life in 1934 he was falling out of fashion. Christopher believes he warrants reassessment, however. “I do see him as fitting into a comic tradition, as there’s a recognisable British style that’is handed down through the ages,” he says.

“In Merry Wives, Shakespeare is evolving a representation of English middle-class life and I feel Pinero is doing the same thing, holding a mirror up to the environment he knew.

“What he did that was significant was to take comedy to the respectable middle classes when theatre became a more respectable pursuit.”

Christopher points out that Oscar Wilde wrote his comedy of manners, The Importance Of Being Earnest, eight years after Pinero’s Dandy Dick. “Wilde must have been influenced by him. You can see that dry, very ironic view of life in Pinero’s writing – and you could also imagine Shakespeare’s Falstaff being a character in a Pinero play.”

Pinero came from Portuguese/Jewish stock but thought of himself as very much an Englishman. “His grandfather was a first-generation immigrant who was a very successful lawyer, but his father wasted it away, so Arthur left school at ten but was mad on the theatre,” says Chrisopher.

“As a child, he used to stand outside the Garrick Club as the actors came in and out, and later he ran away from the lawyers’ office to become an actor, working with Henry Irving and then writing what they called ‘curtain-raisers’: one act plays presented before the main event.”

So began a prolific play-writing career that continued until two years before his death and produced 50 plays. “In his day Pinero was more popular than George Bernard Shaw, but what happened was that the bright young things, Noel Coward and Somerset Maugham, took over, writing their own versions of plays of fallen women or women of easy virtue. After he wrote The Second Mrs Tanqueray, Wilde did the same, writing Lady Windermere’s Fan. They all rather stole his thunder.”

Now Christopher Luscombe is seeking to steal it back for him.

  • Dandy Dick runs at Grand Opera Houe, York, from August 14 to 18 at 7.30pm plus 2.30pm, Wednesday, Thursday and Saturday. Box office: 0844 871 3024 or atgtickets.com/york