This is the kind of production one had almost given up hope of seeing: a restoration of a comic masterpiece more concerned to mine the author’s text than explore the director’s ego. William Congreve’s 1700 play, with its labyrinthine plot, is not the easiest play to do but James Macdonald brings to it the scrupulous clarity and concern for language that he learned in his 14 years at the Royal Court.
The stock charge against the piece is that it boasts great scenes but is hard to follow. Here, however, Macdonald steers us lucidly through the complex schemes by which Fainall plans to get hold of his wife’s inheritance and make off with his lover, Mrs Marwood. In contrast to that kind of legal chicanery and sexual duplicity lies the wooing of Mirabell and Millamant, in which contractual obligation is combined with real feeling. Their scenes together have something of the witty raillery of Beatrice and Benedick in Much Ado; Congreve also shows, arguably for the first time on the British stage, that a true marriage has to be based on mutual respect, consideration and a genuine sense of gender equality.
Like all great comedy, Congreve’s play has a fundamental sanity. It also ushers us into a dignified William and Mary-era London nicely realised in Anna Fleischle’s design, with its dark-panelled rooms glimpsed through a lime-green surround. But the heart of the play lies in the classic confrontation of Millamant and Mirabell. As the former, Justine Mitchell is deliciously capricious and changeable, but her radiant smiles suggest a basic goodness of heart. If I were picky, I’d question some of her line readings: when she says “I may by degrees dwindle into a wife”, the stress should surely lie on the unexpected verb, which her partner later echoes, rather than the final noun. But Mitchell presents us with a real woman instead of a porcelain artefact and Geoffrey Streatfeild is a perfect Mirabell in his mix of incisiveness, wiliness and true feeling.
The showiest part, however, is that of Lady Wishfort, whose money everyone is after and whose sexual appetite, as her name implies, is undiminished. Like Sophie Stanton in a comparable role in RSC’s Mary Pix comedy The Fantastic Follies of Mrs Rich, Haydn Gwynne shows that a character can be absurd and likable at the same time. Gwynne is very funny when gazing at her unadorned features in the mirror (“I look like an old peeled wall”) and when hurling herself intemperately at a chaise longue to find the right posture for an expected suitor.
But you feel deep sympathy for her when, as Fainall seeks to tie her to an extortionate contract, she cries “Never to marry!” in despair at a life of sexless solitude. In a play that scarcely has a dud role, there is a wealth of fine performances. Tom Mison and Jenny Jules lend the arch plotters a hint of inner complexity. There is also rich support from Fisayo Akinade as a gossipy fop, Alex Beckett as a far-from-green valet and Christian Patterson as a Shropshire gent charging into this dandified world like a bull in a china shop. But this last character ultimately reveals a wholehearted charity and rational kindness in keeping with the spirit of Congreve’s play and Macdonald’s illuminating production.
- At the Donmar Warehouse, London, until 26 May. Box office: 020-3282 3808.
