Christopher Prentice is brilliantly funny playing it straight as Anne’s barely willing suitor Slender; he has great command of the text and mastery of every malapropism … Malpropism-prone Slender gains most of our sympathy here thanks to a fantastically funny performance by Prentice, who has apparently been at the festival for three seasons but was hitherto unnoticed by me. He mangles the English language masterfully; his anxious ambivalence about marriage – and everything else – is a treat.