Racy comedy is in a rush

THE COUNTRY WIFE, Royal Exchange Theatre

ONE of award-winning director Polly Findlay’s other productions is Derren Brown’s entertainingly fun but slightly creepy theatre show “Svengali”.

And she brings the same sort of good fun, hard-edged feel to this 17th Century Restoration comedy, usually played as a sort of 340-year-old farce.

Not that the play doesn’t have farcical elements, but at its heart it is a cold-hearted comedy very much of its decadent time, full of men and women keen to indulge in illicit sexual pleasure while maintaining a gloss of worldly honour.

Even the couple held up by the play as relatively virtuous — Harcourt and Alithea (Nicholas Bishop and Eliza Collins) — prove to be a pretty duplicitous pair. And Horner, the rake who puts it about that he can’t, well, put it about, to gain the easy company of randy wives and daughters so he can put it about, is a sexual predator of the most devious kind, admired by his stupid acquaintances.

Pinchwife, normally portrayed as something of a comedy dolt worthy of being cuckolded, here comes over as a figure of fun with a vicious streak, always rather too ready to threaten violence on his Welsh “country wife”.

All this would be rather more enjoyable than it is — and despite the above, it is at times very funny — if the cuts that send us home just before 10pm, sooner than anyone might expect, didn’t add to a sense of rushing through the motions. At times I found it hard to follow the actors, who didn’t always project as far as my gallery seat as they raced from scene to scene.

But while the performers make an intelligent and hard-working ensemble that provides laughs along the way, the evening seems slightly lacking in charisma.

Felix Scott is a sexually overactive Horner, Amy Morgan a delightfully-accented Welsh Mrs Pinchwife, Roger Morlidge bluff as Fidget and Oliver Gomm seriously foppish as Sparkish.

But Nick Fletcher seems rather serious as Pinchwife, and if anything too young to be the centre of the play’s comedy.

And while Morgan comes close, none of them is the heart of the play - because I’m not sure there is one.