The Country Wife – Royal Exchange, Manchester
Naya Tsentourou
It’s not often that Restoration comedy arrives in Manchester. When it does, however, the genre’s poignant social critique, its unconventional values, and its celebration of playhouses find in the city’s culture a perfect fit. Polly Findlay’s production of William Wycherley’s The Country Wife, first performed in 1675 and shunned for two centuries due to its explicitly licentious content, is invigorating, offering the audience the pleasures of dusty wigs, foolish wits, and winning performances, alluring both to the eye and to the ear.
Sexual licence in Wycherley’s play seeks out locations alternative to the bedroom: a sofa, a private corner, a trunk, the theatre, the New Exchange, St James’s park, a street. Accordingly, Helen Goddard’s flexible stage design moves effortlessly between the domestic scenes in Horner’s or Pinchwife’s lodgings and the scenes in London locations. The short, barred gates, the wine taps (yes, wine taps!), and the posts create visible, yet transparent barriers around the stage, enhancing the play’s tiptoeing between marital and social entrapment, on the one hand, and seditious and hypocritical liberality, on the other. In a play about plays and playhouses, the Royal Exchange’s imposing and intimate round construction (as well as the mirrors hanging from the ceiling) adds extra meta-theatrical layers to the characters’ talk of the promiscuity found in the theatre’s boxes and the wits found in the pit, inviting us to consider the firmness of our own moral codes. The horns on the lamp-posts and what looks like magnified horns on the ceiling (in fact the spreading branches of a tree, possibly an allusion to Wycherley’s earlier and similarly provocative comedy, Love in A Wood, or a hint at infectious cuckoldry) are not so subtle, but still clever, touches to a play where cuckolds reign in their stupidity, accident, and pretence of honour.
Felix Scott is delightful in his Horner, as a masterful and cynical conniver, pretending impotence, and getting the husbands to inadvertently prostitute their wives to him. Gesturing persistently (and predictably) to his crotch, Scott’s performance is as jocular and vivid as the play itself, striking a fine balance between an opportunistic sex fiend and a deeply cynical social observer. Nick Fletcher’s compelling Pinchwife starts off as the caricature of the jealous husband, frantic and oppressive, his keys always jangling and powerfully audible even before he enters the stage. The first half gone, however, Fletcher skilfully allows us glimpses into a darker version of the character, with obsessive fears erupting in the violent squeeze of an orange and culminating in vigorous brutality towards Margery at the letter-writing scene. Maggie Service (Lady Fidget) offers an amusing performance as the leader of Wycherley’s ‘virtuous gang’, confident in her shifts between counterfeit honour and genuine promiscuity, and entering the play’s famous china scene triumphant; the vase’s too closely phallic shape perhaps as superfluous as Horner’s constant crotch-pointing , yet successful in delighting the audience. Oliver Gomm as Sparkish is full of spark both in his energetic performance of a camp, self-conceited buffoon, and in his flamboyant costumes and hair.
If there is one performance that dominates the stage it is undoubtedly that of Amy Morgan as Margery Pinchwife. In a brilliant combination of country innocence and cruel honesty, Morgan’s Margery with her Welsh accent and capricious body language is funnier than ever leaving the audience eagerly awaiting her reappearance. Childish and coquettish, Morgan reinvents Margery as the young wife who becomes gradually transformed into a complete Restoration lady, nearing orgasm while writing to her lover under her husband’s nose.
If only one complaint, it’s that Findlay’s handling of Harcourt (Nicholas Bishop)’s courting of Alithea (Eliza Collings) feels somewhat uninspired. Harcourt’s honourable conduct and honest professions of love provide a moral focus contradictory to the play’s blurring of the villainous with the virtuous (Horner only seduces those who seek to be seduced). In a play where marital relationships seem to function only as a disguise to licentious or tyrannical instincts, and where Harcourt himself early in the night warns that women may ‘doze you’, the couple’s happy ending -sealed with a kiss- seems slightly distracting.
Overall, this is a wonderful production with powerful performances, setting the audience loose (with laughter) and recreating the extravagance, the vibrancy, the freedom, and above all, the irresistible appeal of Restoration decadence.
The Country Wife is at the Royal Exchange until 20th October