By ALEX SPENCE
It was always a risk, staging a 17th-century comedy of sexual manners as your debut, and first-time director Heath Jones' adaptation of William Wycherley's The Country Wife is not entirely successful.
To be fair, the performance I saw was the opening-night dress rehearsal, the day before the season truly
got under way, and Jones had got some things right - namely the costume and set design. But some of the acting was problematic.
For a start, the dialogue was delivered much too quickly; my companion, unfamiliar with the text, found herself lost for much of the first act. Worse, several of the lead male performances were infuriatingly over the top.
Any Restoration comedy is bound to be mannered, but the male performances were too camp, at times hysterical. Benjamin Mardle as the giggling, airheaded Sparkish enjoys the funniest lines, but he spoiled them with his shrill delivery - it was sometimes difficult to make out what he was saying. At least he was well cast.
The same couldn't be said of Blue Pilkington as the carousing Horner. We're supposed to find Horner charming even when his manhood is most severely questioned, yet instead of conveying the sly, subtle wit required of the role, the actor went for exaggerated, open-crotched posturing. It was unconvincing, overly contrived.
The female actors were more relaxed. One could almost detect an audible sigh of relief during the scenes between Anna Meech's Alithea and Amanda Billing's Margery.
Billing, particularly, brought a welcome naturalness to her part. Apparently untrained, she appeared surprisingly at ease, and her timing was excellent. The scene where Margery is forced at knife-point by her jealous husband, Pinchwife, to write a letter rebuking Horner's advances was by far the play's most effective.
Jones apparently cut some of Wycherley's original text - he could have trimmed it even further. This dress rehearsal lasted more than two and a half hours. To sit through such a convoluted plot for that length of time is asking a lot of an audience.
I hope that as the season progresses Jones will have tightened the performance and reined in some of his actors, making The Country Wife a more enjoyable experience.
