21st-century Soho’s much too tame for these rakish revellers
The Country Wife (Minerva Theatre, Chichester) Verdict: Hackneyed ★★✩✩✩
COULD the trade union of amalgamated theatre directors and designers please impose a moratorium on modernised plays set in London’s Soho?
Jonathan Munby’s production of William Wycherley’s Restoration comedy The Country Wife is the latest victim of this now cliched approach.
Neon signs scream: ‘ Girls! Girls! Girls!’ This is a place of sex clubs and allegedly heavy drinking, though it is all too neat and stylised. Soutra Gilmour’s horrible set is remorselessly black.
The 17th- century rakes are done up in skinny jeans and black-and-white shirts.
Was Restoration London not a place of vivid frivolity? Why impose on the evening a colourcode of such unremitting dreariness? If done in period dress, Wycherley’s crazy play reminds you that the oppression of the Cromwellian commonwealth had just given way to Charles II’s reign of licentious liberty.
Wives are taking freedom into their own hands. Husbands make fools of themselves trying to contain their spirited spouses.
If done in a Restoration setting, you can taste the newness of the freedoms and the overthrow of an old order. If plonked in 21stcentury Soho, it feels tame and hackneyed. Today’s Soho, which has been colonised by anaemic careerists, is no longer remotely alternative. There is a bawdier sub- culture these days in outer suburbia.
After an opening pavane (another over-used idea), the production gives us sex-maniac Horner in his lair. To increase his access to London’s society wives, Horner has decided to pose as a eunuch.
Daft squires such as Sir Jasper Fidget and Mr Pinchwife, who has brought his ripe young wife to town from the country, allow Horner to entertain their ladies. The fools!
Lex Shrapnel’s Horner may look louche, but he did not strike me as much of a charmer.
The show is saved by the Pinchwifes: John Hodgkinson raising the energy levels as the doomed cuckold and Susannah Fielding a yellow-skirted apricot in monochrome London.
Much of the rest of this production is unexceptional.