THE COUNTRY WIFE. To 12 January.
London
THE COU NTRY WIFE
by William Wycherley
Theatre Royal Haymarket To 12 January 2008.
Mon-Sat 7.30pm Mat Wed & Sat 2.30pm.
Runs 2hr 45min One interval.
TICKETS: 0844 844 2353 (booking charge of up to £3.50 per ticket).
Review: Timothy Ramsden 10 October.
Going to town with Wycherley’s comedy.
What a political statement Restoration Comedy must have made, gladdening pleasure-seekers’ hearts, grinding post-Cromwellian Puritanism in the dust of defeat. Playwriting and acting, blasphemous enough in itself, reached new depths of lewdness. And with female characters played by, well, women.
In William Wycherley’s masterly example, the warning against libertinism as a source of disease is reversed: serial-seducer Horner pretends to have lost his sexual powers through treatment for “the French disease”, to gain access to other men’s wives. Country simplicity is a mask of ignorance which Margery Pinchwife throws off as soon as London teaches her better. And her husband, who exercises Puritanical authority over her, is a jealous tyrant to be outwitted in the plot and mocked by the audience.
Wycherley is working on a different moral plane from this. Amid the sexual trickery and tyranny, alongside the alternative complacency of the fop Sparkish, the play shows the gradual coming together of two balanced, affectionate and like-minded people in Alithea and Harcourt.
She rejects him at first, because of her good faith and his initially appearing to be seeking sex rather than expressing love. Elisabeth Dermot Walsh shows the character’s strength amidst the sexually turbulent society around, something given a modern gloss in Jonathan Kent’s opening production of his company season at the Haymarket.
Costumes suggest Restoration flamboyance without quite specifying period, while a pool-hall and rubbish-bins punctuate the action with downbeat modernity. The rosy-papered room Paul Brown’s design gives for Margery’s home suggests a woman kept as a child, and one problem with the modern associations is that they jar with the treatment of women in the 1660s.
But Kent relies too much on surface excitability. And while there are some neat performances round the edges, Fiona Glascott gives the title character an all-too-childish vehemence. The production specifies she’s from Yorkshire, but she rarely sounds like it. Thank goodness for Jo Stone-Fewings, whose Sparkish, potentially the most tedious character, is truly comic. His broad self-pleased smile, the eyes that light up with dimness, the variety of expression in movements of the lower-arms, would be outstanding in any company.
Horner: Toby Stephens.
Quack: David Shaw-Parker.
Boy: Timothy Bateson.
Sir Jaspar Fidget: Nicholas Day.
Lady Fidget: Patricia Hodge.
Dainty Fidget: Lucy Tregear.
Mrs Squeamish: Liz Crowther.
Harcourt: John Hopkins.
Dorilant: Tristan Beint.
Sparkish: Jo Stone-Fewings.
Pinchwife: David Haig.
Mrs Margery Pinchwife: Fiona Glascott.
Ms Alithea: Elisabeth Dermot Walsh.
Lucy: Cathertine Bailey.
Old Lady Squeamish: Janet Brown.
Director: Jonathan Kent.
Designer/Costume: Paul Brown.
Lighting: Mark Henderson.
Sound: Paul Groothuis.
Music: Steven Edis.
Fight director: Paul Benzing.
Assistant director: Lloyd Wood.
Associate designer: Luis Carvalho.
2007-10-16 01:34:04