It is hard to see the virtue in this production of Stephen Jeffreys's play about John Wilmot, second Earl of Rochester, who had a self-destructive streak a mile wide. Rochester was silly, frittered his talents and his wife's love, and courted disaster, particularly in dealings with King Charles II, but he was probably better than he thought himself. This was a man who had a permanent hard-on but who couldn't bear to be loved.
George Etherege's restoration comedy The Man of Mode was based on Rochester, and the theatre played a major role in his life both as man of letters and rake. It was his pornographic play that criticised the king that proved his downfall. But Jeffreys suggests that there was something more to it than that, as if in the artifice of the theatre he found a truth of emotion that he was utterly unable to locate in his own life.
His attraction for actress Elizabeth Barry, with whom he had an unhappy affair, seemed, for his part, to be less based on physical attraction and more because she acted with such straightforward honesty that he could glimpse her soul, something he kept losing in himself.
All this seems apparent in Jeffreys's script but not in a production that takes a Nell Gywnne and oranges approach to history. There are some good ideas here, not least in the way the auditorium has been transformed into a total environment with the audience seated at coffee-house style chairs and tables, which allows the cast to get up close and personal. For a play that is so much about reality and illusion, this play-within-a-play device is very clever.
But new director Katie Read often encourages the cast to overdo the roistering so that the evening gradually degenerates into a high-class tits and bums romp. It is a bit of a carry-on, rather than something deeper and more reflective that really gets to the essence of a man who lived hard and fast and tried to ignore the fact that maggots were nibbling at his soul.
As Rochester, Paul Lewis is rather good, warning us not to fall for his charms and then making sure that we do, and there is a really first class performance from Julia Marsen as his wife, a woman suffering with dignity as she watches her husband self-destruct.
Until February 25. Box office: 020-7223 2223.
