Zesty revival of a long-awaited Restoration comedy
You wait for ages for a Restoration comedy to come along, then three show up at once. Southwark Playhouse is trying its luck with William Wycherley’s The Country Wife, the Donmar is presenting William Congreve’s The Way of the World but first the RSC has exhumed a rarity: The Beau Defeated; Or, The Lucky Younger Brother by Mary Pix.
Pix – one of a number of talented and marginalised female writers of the period – also wrote novels and tragic epics. Were she alive today, she’d be living in a big house in Hampstead on the back of Netflix series and primetime sitcoms. There’s something rather Abfab about The Fantastic Follies of Mrs Rich (as it has been retitled by director Jo Davies); it positively delights in showing men up as patronising, conceited asses, but it takes an egalitarian view of folly.
Its central character, the wealthy widow Mrs Rich, is looking to bag a handsome aristocrat with a view to moving into high society. Shallow? You bet, although status anxiety was, as now, the curse of the age. The first scene has Sophie Stanton’s Mrs R complaining that she has been dismissed as a mere “citizen”.
The last scene? I won’t spoil the denouement but suffice to say that while we see Stanton – a forthright comic joy – quivering with pleasure at having “arrived”, Mrs R’s triumph comes at the cost of learning the hard way that appearances can be deceptive – and that even deceptive appearances can’t be taken at face-value.
What starts on a straightforward note rapidly twists and tangles – plotting was to this crowd what poetry was to Shakespeare. The “Beau” is the foppish Sir John Roverhead (Tam Williams); the “lucky younger brother” is the virtuous, accidentally disinherited Clerimont who masquerades as a rogue to appeal to Lady Landsworth (Daisy Badger).
Augmented by Grant Olding’s original songs and Colin Richmond’s graffiti’d design, Davies’s production strenuously argues the case for the play’s inclusion in the repertoire. Every performance, among the intellectually superior serving-class particularly, is a zesty one. There’s even a woman-on-woman sword-fight. Now when did you last see that at the RSC? About time, huh?
Until June 14. Tickets: 01789 403493; rsc.org.uk