A provocative comedy, beautifully performed
British drama abounds with scepticism about marriage, depictions of marital misery and repugnant husbands. In the works of Shakespeare, we need think only of jealous Leontes in The Winter’s Tale, or Petruchio in The Taming of the Shrew, to behold what a blight it must have been (and must still be) to be shackled to a tyrant.
At the Swan, Stratford, director Phillip Breen has released a monster from the vaults – one whose name says it all. Sir John Brute, the creation of John Vanbrugh (architect, playwright, Whig radical, spy), is about as toxic an instance of masculinity as was e’er conceived, making the 1697 play in which he appears as problematic as Shrew (which is currently being revived, in a gender-flipped fashion, on the main stage).
The challenge to audiences, as misogyny sounds its disgust, is that the effect is, at one level, riotously comic. Shuffling on in a grimy nightgown, like a sickly forebear of Scrooge, Jonathan Slinger’s Sir John is so brazen in his bile, he’s funny. Vanbrugh – who suffered prolonged imprisonment in France – steeps the opening soliloquy in the stench of incarceration: “Everything I hear, everything I feel, everything I smell and everything I taste – methinks has wife in’t,” moans this misery guts.
You could argue Slinger’s portrayal is too much caricature. David Garrick, in 1757, steered away from uncouthness, his Sir John acrimonious rather than rude, masking the malevolence. But the contrast between primal unpleasantness and the
affected sophistication of the society he moves in – given to epigrammatic ornateness – is well rendered. When Brute manhandles his spouse with rapine hands and drunkenly kisses her to test her reaction for revulsion, the effect is shocking.
Tilting between jest and earnest, subtlety and broad effect, the complexity of the text, with its purring entertainment and clawing viciousness, is beautifully served by a crack cast, with the musicians forming an indispensable part of numerous impish period tableaux. The plot, concerning the bid by Alexandra Gilbreath’s quietly pained Lady B to overturn scruples about virtue and engineer an affair with her covert admirer (Rufus Hound’s tentative Constant), is, by Restoration comedy standards, slight; there are moments of repetitive sentiment, lovely but ornamental bouts of singing, and a round of superficially convoluted carry-on in the dragging second half.
Trimming would help, but the sheer commitment invested means the production doesn’t outstay its welcome. After his exuberant turn as Sancho Panza in Don Quixote, Hound demonstrates further versatility. Caroline Quentin is a beauty-spotted joy as Lady Fancyfull, a self-deluded ageing female fop attended by a whirl of smirking servants, while John Hodgkinson brings lordly aloofness to the gent (Heartfree) who would mend her faults and faux-woos her, but has designs on Lady Brute’s intriguing niece Bellinda (Natalie Drew).
Last but not least, Les Dennis makes his RSC debut as Colonel Bully, a debauched rapscallion. His big moment involves writhing on the floor with an orange stuffed in his mouth; an additional curious enticement for a provoking, fascinating, queasily enjoyable evening.