Bad Restoration

The Country Wife, by William Wycherley. Charles II's England shared the obsession of its king--it was sex-mad. From that consuming passion sprang the witty, monomaniacally bawdy drama known as Restoration comedy. If Congreve was the age's greatest theatrical wit, Wycherley (1640-1715) may well have been its most vigorous social chronicler. He was a rake who later reformed, with all the zealotry that implies. In him, the pagan warred with the Puritan, the scandalizer with the sermonizer, and perhaps never more fiercely than in his most durable play, The Country Wife.

The plot is carnally direct. Mr. Horner (Stacy Keach), a notorious London lecher, has it bruited about town through his quack doctor that recent sexual misadventures in France have left him impotent. He rightly guesses that this will give him unlimited access to bored wives and unmatched opportunities to cuckold their husbands. The game is at least as important as the score to Horner, and he especially relishes the sight of husbands forcing their wives upon him under the delusion that he is an innocuous companion.

A co-plot might be called Sex and the Country Girl, or how Mrs. Pinch-wife (Elizabeth Huddle) is schooled in the sexual duplicities of the big city. The climax is a scene of biting mockery in which Mr. Pinchwife, more jealous jailer than husband, is tricked into delivering his wife, masked, straight to Horner's seduction headquarters.

The satirist in Wycherley never subdued the pornographer, and this bed-drawing-room comedy contains some of the most salaciously funny scenes and speeches known to dramatic literature. But if Wycherley uses, and perhaps abuses, sex to make his point, sex is not his point. His moral intent is to show that ethics are lowest where the prizes are greatest--and sex was the dearest trophy of Restoration society.

With its woefully unseasoned actors, its melting-pot English, and its lack of anything resembling ensemble playing, the Lincoln Center Repertory Company is pitiably overmatched by the play. However, no American company would be likely to carry it off successfully. The heart of this comedy is heartlessness, and its surface is its substance. It demands dry, stylized cynicism. By temperament and training, this is alien to the American actor, who almost invariably tries to humanize his role and to bridle the most outrageous farce with the halter of naturalistic plausibility. And Wycherley's characters cannot be played as people, since they are monsters in velvet and lace, transparencies of vice through which the playgoer is meant to view his own.

The glacial pace at which Robert Symonds has directed The Country Wife is a further handicap. Speed, as well as brevity, is the soul of wit, and double entendres go best at the double-quick. Tame Wycherley is lame Wycherley--which is precisely what is wrong at Lincoln Center.

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