Sexual desire generally results in clothes coming off, but the lovestruck characters in Jean Anouilh’s The Rehearsal put extra garments on. Residents and staff of a French chateau in 1950 are corseted and hooped in 18th-century costumes for a run-through of their production of Pierre de Marivaux’s infidelity drama The Double Inconstancy.
The Count, directing, has cast himself in love scenes with Lucille, a virginal young maid. This alarms both his wife, the Countess, and his mistress, Hortensia. They have been happy to share the master of the house between them, but appreciate the risk to both their positions by the introduction of a rival who seems to have provoked not only desire but, more dangerously, love.
France has always diverged from Britain in definitions of sexual morality, and part of the enduring appeal of this play is its depiction of the extreme limits of marital laissez-faire. “Speaking as her lover, I will not allow you to be unfaithful to your wife,” runs one moral paradox in a vivacious translation by Jeremy Sams, who also directs this revival.
But, although often very funny, the play moves beyond a Feydeauesque bedroom farce through the layers of reality created by having actors playing actors who are putting on a play. As in Pirandello’s Six Characters in Search of an Author and Stoppard’s The Real Thing, it is while pretending to be someone else that the characters are most themselves.
Niamh Cusack gloriously portrays both the smooth surface charm of the Countess and the brutish cunning to which she stoops to keep up appearances. Edward Bennett, advanced to the front rank of classical actors by his recent Royal Shakespeare Company work, is outstanding as Hero, a self-disgusting drunk who is procured into a seduction that rivals for brutal theatrical power the notorious defloration scene in Le Liaisons Dangereuses.
• At the Minerva, Chichester, until 13 June. Box office: 01243 781 312.
