A Journey to London

Synopsis

In the middle of A Journey to London, just as he had got his characters wound up and ready for the plot to take off, Restoration playwright John Vanbrugh put down his pen half way through a sentence and never wrote another word. James Saunders took this play about a country MP and his family coming to London who find themselves embroiled in the wicked ways of the city, and created the most sophisticated Restoration comedy for our times - sex and marriage 1700 style with twentieth century hindsight.

Our Review:

19 December 2005

Sir John Vanbrugh only saw two of his plays performed in his lifetime, The Relapse and The Provok'd Wife. But on his death in 1726, a three-act fragment of a third, A Journey To London, was found among his papers. Vanbrugh had planned to make the work a damning indictment of traditional marital roles, intending to climax with the irreconcilable breakdown of a marriage. However, the playwright's friend Colley Cibber ignored his wishes, giving the piece a conventionally happy ending and staging it in 1728 as The Provok'd Husband.

That, though, was not the end of the story. In 1986, the Orange Tree's tireless artistic director Sam Walters invited resident dramatist James Saunders to compose a new ending for Vanbrugh's original. Now, to mark Saunders' passing in 2004, the theatre has revived that collaboration, adding a further chapter to a saga that spans 280 years and straddles four centuries.

Watching Walters' frothy production, with its hoist...

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