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Director
Jonathan
Kent
Designer
Paul Brown
Lighting
Designer
Mark Henderson
Sound
Designer
Paul Groothuis
Music
Steve Edis
Horner
Toby Stephens
Quack
David Shaw-Parker
Boy
Timothy Bateson
Sir
Jasper Fidget
Nicholas
Day
Lady
Fidget
Patricia
Hodge
Dainty
Fidget
Lucy Tregear
Mrs
Squeamish
Liz Crowther
Harcourt
John Hopkins
Dorilant
Tristan
Breint
Sparkish
Jo Stone-Fewings
Pinchwife
David Haig
Mrs
Margery Pinchwife
Fiona Glascott
Ms Alithea
Elisabeth
Dermot Walsh
Lucy
Catherine
Bailey
Old
Lady
Squeamish
Catherine
Brown
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Theatre Royal Haymarket
27 Sept 2007 - 12 Jan 2008 |
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The first
question one asks about Jonathan
Kent's revival of The
Country Wife
is: why now? Wycherley's comedy
was written in the Restoration,
when the aristocracy was rediscovering
debauchery after years of
limpness and impotence under
Cromwell's Protectorate (adultery
had been a capital offence).
The play is best viewed as
a reaction to an authoritarian
regime, the sort of sinning
by numbers a teenager feels
duty bound to commit when
his parents have gone away
for the weekend. Beplumed
gallants stick two fingers
up at the Puritans before
fastening their shoe buckles.
But the exuberance is easily
sapped. A leisured class with
no obvious employment, waiting
on royal appointments, is
handicapped by lack of purpose
-- can only assert its dominance
through sexual conquest.
Sexual conquest is at the
play's centre. Horner the
number one rakehell has come
up with the ruse of having
a doctor declare he has been
clapped in France and become
impotent. But this "eunuch",
who is now advertised to chaperone
ladies (including the excellent
Patricia Hodge who plays Lady
Fidget) is rifling through
the pleasures of his patrons'
seraglios. The springs of
the action turn on Horner's
stratagems for seducing Mrs
Margery Pinchwife, who is
inadvertently pushed to fall
in love, write an amorous
letter, and think up deceits,
by her pathologically jealous
husband, who ultimately leads
her in disguise to Horner's
chamber.
What does a play about fornication
and adultery have to teach
us today? Jonathan Kent updates
the Restoration fops with
Teddy boy coats and slicked-back
hair. They lounge about reading
Country Life, rubbing apples
on their crotches. Fashionable
oak-paneled rooms of the seventeenth
century are juxtaposed with
pool games in garages, Vauxhall
pleasure gardens are reduced
to a cheap penny-arcade where
you shoot at sitting ducks.
And presiding over this collision
of past and present is Toby
Stephens' Horner with swashbuckling
gestures and a Sid Vicious
lip-curl.
Kent seems to be stating the
obvious. The brittle and facetious
gallantry of a Restoration
world with its inversion of
meanings (protecting your
honour becomes code for keeping
one's mistress secret) is
just like our own. If this
is the case why not turn to
an episode of Sex and the
City or another sit-com where
the writing is not so obvious?
This Wycherley adaptation
is too broad; its characters
too shrill and hysterical
- both Toby Stephens' Horner
and David Haig's Pinchwife
make their entrance like a
heavy metal band launching
straight into squealing guitar
solos- where can they go from
there?
The production's message is
muddled. In the play women
actively pursue intrigues
and have the upper hand when
it comes to knowing who their
bastards actually belong to.
Their most tender point is
their reputation, as long
as that is intact they share
with the men an equality of
lust and deception. However,
Kent insists on making Margery
Pinchwife the victim. The
publicity photos show a naked
woman astride a cow, clutching
a piglet, surrounded by traffic
on the M25. She is being taken
to London, a notorious meat
market. How will a marooned
rustic, locked up by Pinchwife
in a slanting pink bedroom,
be able to defend herself
against the wiles of the gallants
who associate with her brother-in-law
to be, Sparkish?
Jo Stone-Fewing's Sparkish,
the fop who can never quite
attain the easy wit of the
gallant, was easily the most
convincing gentleman - his
comic and convincing strut
can be seen in plenty of young
men today. Fiona Glascott
downplays the wife's easy
affability with her husband,
instead playing her as a child
caught up in one continuous
raspberry-blowing tantrum.
She is so repressed that her
secret letter to Horner brings
her to orgasm. Kent rubs in
the hopelessness of her caged
existence by casting a real
white rabbit in a pink hutch
in her bedroom.
Pinchwife reinforces the play's
animal metaphors (cross-breeding
improves the stock- hence
illegitimate children) by
treating Margery to a variety
of doggy commands - Fetch
and Sit are all the conjugal
communication needed - with
the occasional 'good girl'
thrown in. Kent emphasizes
the dangers of treating wives
as a new addition to the domestic
menagerie but he gropes for
a larger political point.
This leads to a confusing,
badly lit urban scene where
a poster of a woman with her
mouth slashed with red suggests
sexual violence.
The undoubted star of this
production was Timothy Bateson's
shuffling Boy, the footman
to Horner. He combined complete
naturalness with a nice line
in blue dressing gowns. Aside
from Boy, I was left with
no abiding memories of this
production and longed for
the sophistication of a writer
like the Earl of Rochester,
a man who criticized the age's
excesses while enjoying its
pleasure. He knew that the
puritan hangover the morning
after made the writing so
much stronger.
Daniel Jeffreys |
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