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