Sunday Telegraph 13th
July 1997, John Gross
At the Old Vic, Peter Hall’s repertory company are
presenting an interesting and broadly successful production of Sir John
Vanbrugh’s Restoration comedy The Provok’d Wife, directed by Lindsay Posner. It
is Restoration in kind, though hardly in date: it was first produced as late as
1697, and the version being used is the 1726 version, in which the drunken Sir
John Brute masquerades as his own wife. (In the original it was as a
clergyman).
It is odd to think that in the 18th
century David Garrick invested Brute with a certain charm. To modern tastes he
is the husband from hell, which is how Michael Pennington plays him –
scruffy-haired, leering, diseased-looking (though it is a subtle performance
that also allows for a certain amount of pathos and a food deal of self-pity).
No one else in the cast quite measures up to
Pennington; no one else brings out the comedy quite as deftly as he does at his
best – in the passages, for example, where he describes how a lady of leisure
fritters away her day. The production could be – should be- much funnier. But
there are brisk contributions from, among others, Clare Swinburne and Stephen
Noonan: the dramatic vigour of the piece comes across, and so does Vanbrugh’s
gift for easy natural dialogue.
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