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Restoration Comedy
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The art of acting in Restoration Comedy, the buoyant, often bawdy romps that celebrated the re-opening of the English theatres after Cromwell's dour reign, is the subject of Simon Callow's bold investigation. There is cause again to celebrate as Callow, one of Britain 's foremost actors and directors, aims to restore the form to all its original voluptuous vigor. Callow shows the way to attain the clarity and hilarity in some of the most delightful roles ever conceived for the theatre.
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For her recent “Restoration Comedy” – her first play to be seen in San Diego – she plunged through the sex comedies that regaled the rakes and roués of late 17th century London. Out of such research she's fashioned a series of thoughtful plays with historical heft, contemporary point and Mel Brooks merriment.
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Restoration comedy peaked twice. The genre came to spectacular maturity in the mid-1670s with an extravaganza of aristocratic comedies. Twenty lean years followed this short golden age, although the achievement of Aphra Behn in the 1680s is to be noted. In the mid-1690s a brief second Restoration comedy renaissance arose, aimed at a wider audience. The comedies of the golden 1670s and 1690s peak times are extremely different from each other. An attempt is made below to illustrate the generational taste shift by describing The Country Wife (1676) and The Provoked Wife (1697) in some detail.
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Like a piece of divinity -- the candy, not the virtue -- Seattle Repertory Theatre's world premiere production of Amy Freed's Restoration Comedy is as light as air and full of deliciously empty calories. From the outset, characters with names like Narcissa, Loveless, Lord Foppington, and Hilaria cheerfully admit that "we just wanted to wear the clothes." And no wonder! Anna R. Oliver's glorious costumes wrap the cast in a Technicolor rainbow of swirling satins and silks. The men's hair flows as freely and beautifully, if not more so, than the women's. There are pratfalls, cleavage jokes, rhyming couplets, thong underwear, and plenty of seduction scenes.
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During the second wave of Restoration comedy in the 1690s, the "softer" comedies of William Congreve and John Vanbrugh reflected mutating cultural perceptions and great social change. The playwrights of the 1690s set out to appeal to more socially mixed audiences with a strong middle-class element, and to female spectators, for instance by moving the war between the sexes from the arena of intrigue into that of marriage. The focus in comedy is less on young lovers outwitting the older generation, more on marital relations after the wedding bells. Thomas Southerne's dark The Wives' Excuse (1691) is not yet very "soft": it shows a woman miserably married to the fop Friendall, everybody's friend, whose follies and indiscretions undermine her social worth, since her honour is bound up in his. Mrs Friendall is pursued by a would-be lover, a matter-of-fact rake devoid of all the qualities that made Etherege's Dorimant charming, and she is kept from action and choice by the unattractiveness of all her options. All the humour of this "comedy" is in the subsidiary love-chase and fornication plots, none in the main plot.
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Solid as its mechanics are, "The Constant Couple" feels like the sort of comedy that was probably produced by the yard at one time in Restoration England. Rescuing a sound play from obscurity, as the Pearl has done here, is noble work. But as any fan of Restoration comedy will tell you, noble acts pale in comparison with uproarious fun.
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Restoration Comedy