Old Play in Manhattan

The Country Wife (by William Wycherley) exhibits a panoramic view of sex. Wycherley saw in sex the key to a whole faithless, pleasure-loving Restoration society--a society he exposed by unlocking one bedroom door after another, by unloosing a succession of farcically indecent pranks. The result is about equally crude and complicated in its bawdiness, is both wildly improbable and somehow too close for comfort, is now dated in its assumption, now faded in its effects. But what Critic William Archer once called "the most bestial play in all literature" is still, of its own kind, one of the best. To its exhaustive display of lust it brings an often matching demonstration of lustiness. Nor did Wycherley write it only to amuse or titillate; even as it leers, it looks people up and down, even as it romps, it indicts.

From Terence, Wycherley took a hint for his chief character, a London rake named Horner, who, to make lust easier, spreads the report that he is impotent. At once husbands contemptuously allow him access to their wives, and soon the secretly gloating Horner has a harem. From Moliere's L'Ecole des Femmes, Wycherley took his ingenuous young country wife, who is not quite carefully enough guarded by a jealous husband, and who proves as eager a pupil as Horner is a teacher.

As the not-for-long-ignorant minx, Julie Harris plays with a fine, broad, jubilant gusto--rapturous over having an admirer, ecstatic at being kissed. Never more skillful than when she is play-acting within a play, she is particularly funny, whenever she is deceiving her spouse. As the most sophisticated of Horner's conquests, Pamela Brown performs with a consummate knowingness, an ineffable arrogance; where Julie is all gurgle and prance, Pamela is all polish and sneer. The two actresses play rings around Laurence Harvey's over-mannered and frilly Horner. Indeed, the whole production is too much in a foppish would-be (but probably never-was) Restoration style. Dancing pumps may suit The Country Wife better than clogs, but neither is ideal. The play needs vitality as well as style, not least where time has lamed it. Even so, the evening all in all is enjoyable, but it creates no feeling that The Country Wife has either genuine social meaning or unusual farcical vigor.

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