All dandy in this fine Restoration romp
The Country Wife Minerva Theatre, Chichester ★★★★★
The year 1660 was a “big bang” moment for British theatre: not only a reopening of the playhouses after the closures of the interregnum, but a lifting of restraint: men and women on stage, sex to the fore, pheromones in the air, Hamlet, as t’were, turned coxcomb, the West End a bustling meat-market. In the Jacobean era, the corruptions of the flesh were often an indictment of the body politic; the Restoration crowd, taking their cue from the court, revelled in the impiety.
William Wycherley’s The Country Wife (1675) held a mirror up to the lusty age, scrutinising the blemishes behind the face-powder. The Tatler in 1709 hailed its depiction of a time when “love and wenching were the business of life”; while in 1780, the critic Thomas Davies hailed it as “a more genuine representation of the loose manner, obscene language and dissolute practices of Charles the Second’s reign than any other play whatsoever”. From the mid-18th to the early-20th century, it was considered too rude to put on, centring as it does on a rake – Horner – who pretends to have been eunuch-ised by a disastrous treatment for the pox in France, the better to insinuate himself into the company of women. Today, it feels newly scandalous: it laughs in the face of prudish finger-waggers.
In 1969, Maggie Smith delighted Chichester audiences as the rustic heroine Margery Pinchwife who’s brought to town by her preposterously possessive older husband and falls for Horner’s overtures, acquiring, albeit briefly, the wiles to escape her doltish spouse’s tightening clutches. Almost 50 years on, the play is back in a lucid revival by Jonathan Munby in the studio space – scene of his recent triumph with the Mckellen Lear – that has oodles more infectious comic vitality than the Donmar’s recent, too-restrained The Way of the World.
Soutra Gilmour’s design has been likened in-house to “Vivienne Westwood meets Made in Chelsea”
– lots of black, white and grey, with pinstripes a gogo, in the stylish costuming; contemporary with a louche twist and some libidinal rock music (courtesy of composer Grant Olding, who memorably perked up the National’s One Man, Two Guvnors). I’d have preferred something closer to Restoration-type – this approach has a darkness to it, which smacks of themes being underlined.
Scene by scene, though, from actor to actor, the bawdy balance is pretty much spot on, one moment inviting mirth, then revulsion, then both simultaneously. Susannah Fielding is glorious as the butter-wouldn’t-melt bumpkin, eyes agog at a brave new metropolitan world of modish men, at one point being bundled into view in a schoolboy uniform and looking the spit of Wee Jimmy Krankie. The evening doesn’t stint on showing us how vicious her controlling husband can be, though – John Hodgkinson, a recent Belch at the RSC, is one part fool to two parts ogre, threatening to “write whore with this penknife in your face”.
Lex Shrapnel’s Horner – whose hungover reverie, induced while slumped on a leather sofa, this appears to be – sometimes looks more hunched than capering, more spent than ready to propagate, but still convinces as a tried-and-tested libertine. Belinda Lang almost steals the show as the disdainful, frustrated Lady Fidget (getting her mitts on Horner in that famous, innuendo-laden “china” scene).
Yet the rest of the cast do their utmost to pickpocket our attention too – Wycherley’s ingenious silliness achieves its climax in the foppish, vacant-eyed shape of Scott Karim as the credulous Sparkish, emitting ghastly laughs and admitting the predatory Harcourt (Ashley Zhangazha) to take every liberty going with his vainly protesting fiancée (Jo Herbert). Very fine. Very dandy.
Until July 7; tickets: 01243 781312; cft.org.uk