The Country Wife

The new project of a “quality” West End repertoire at the Haymarket – a bold and welcome initiative under the artistic direction of Jonathan Kent – has got off to an impressive, slightly over-strenuous, start in Kent’s handsomely louche production of William Wycherley’s filthy and diverting comedy The Country Wife.

This is really an Almeida or National production masquerading as a “West End gets hip” effort, with outlandish designs by Paul Brown, shiny period silk frock coats barging up against jeans and winkle-pickers on lifts, and a card school with erotic undertow frankly staged as an orgy by candelabra light; a bunch of grapes is lasciviously chewed in the lap of the supposedly impotent stud, Horner.

Horner is a man who cheerfully pretends he’s lost his sex drive – somewhere in France, apparently – in order to play the field more easily and more widely. Toby Stephens is first seen posing in the altogether, bottom out, leering at the audience in full expectation of seducing a world of chambermaids and old wives.

The brilliantly contrived plot creates a series of volatile relationships around Horner, all of which he exploits: the return to London of stupid old whoremaster Pinchwife, with his young country wife Margery, whom he wants to keep at home like his pet rabbit; the Fidget household whose women are entrusted to the “eunuch” Horner by the senile Sir Jaspar; and the doomed romance of silly Sparkish and his fiancée Alithea, who is really in love with Horner’s sidekick Harcourt.

The play is as much about jealousy and false trust as it is about carnality and impotence, so David Haig’s hilariously wound-up Pinchwife becomes the focal point of attention, rather like the hotel manager in the Ray Cooney farce who declared that there was too much sex going on in his corridors, and he wasn’t having any of it.

Margery has been seduced by a glance or two at the playhouse, and she wants fulfilment. It’s a sign, though, of Fiona Glascott’s screechingly unfunny performance that the famous “letter” scene, where she issues naughty invitations to Horner while writing a rebuttal dictated by the frothing Pinchwife, is virtually incomprehensible.

The hard heartbeat of the social whirl does at last emerge in the playing of John Hopkins as Harcourt and Elisabeth Dermot Walsh as Alithea, while brilliant Jo Stone-Fewings is a bubble-headed delight as Sparkish and Timothy Bateson mutters grumpily on the sidelines as Horner’s ancient doorman Boy. Patricia Hodge’s frightful wig makes her look far less attractive than she should as a compliant, twinkling Lady Fidget, and I’m not sure that impressionist Janet Brown’s Old Lady Squeamish is nearly nasty enough.

- Michael Coveney