Old Play in Manhattan

The Relapse (by Sir John Vanbrugh; produced by the Theatre Guild) reached Broadway just 254 years after it first opened in London. Among the last of the Restoration comedies, it was written to refute the first of the sentimental ones--Colley Cibber's Love's Last Shift.* Otherwise Vanbrugh wrote with small sense of purpose and merely to entertain. The play tells two barely contiguous stories: one--the frilly, mannered tale of Loveless' backsliding--is pure Restoration bawdry; the other--the lusty courtship of a panting, pent-up hoyden--is timeless low comedy. Morally, also, the play faces two ways. It seems utterly callous where Loveless sins with his wife's cousin and house guest; it seems all but Victorian when Loveless' wife not only resists seduction but reduces her would-be seducer to shame.

As entertainment, there is a good deal more to be said for the play's rowdy antics than for its refined depravities. But there is not too much to be said for either: time has not improved what was perhaps always the weakest of Vanbrugh's plays.

The Relapse contains, however, the brightest of his characters, the fatuous coxcomb Lord Foppington. All prance, prattle and fizz, Foppington is far more concerned about the location of a coat pocket than the loss of a wife./- British Actor Cyril Ritchard (Love for Love, Make Way for Lucia) blends a born sense of comedy with a brilliant sense of style. His Foppington is no mere lace-handkerchief dangler, but the eager performer of an idiotic role, with a need and a genius for catching the limelight. Ritchard understands that the key to Foppington and his kind is not an ambiguity of sex but an absorption with self.

* Cibber reformed his rakish hero, Loveless, at the end: Vanbrugh wrote The Relapse to show that Loveless would not have stayed reformed. Love's Last Shift is otherwise chiefly noteworthy for having once been translated into French as La derniere Chemise de l'Amour.

/- Actually, one of Foppington's most amusing lines is in Love's Last Shift. Meaning to be modest, he says: "Stop my vitals, I don't believe there are 500 women in town that ever took any notice of me."

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