Theatre: Restoration Frolic

¶ Married women show all their modesty the first day, because married men show all their love the first day.

¶ Good wives and private soldiers should be ignorant.

¶ Ay, women are apt to tell before the intrigue, as men after it, and so show themselves the vainer sex.

¶ Women of quality are so civil, you can hardly distinguish love from good breeding.

Witticisms, gibes, jokes and epigrams like these, some of which still have currency in the theatre with only superficial changes, are packed by the score into The Country Wife, first produced in London in 1673, when Charles II, the merry monarch of the Restoration, wanted everybody to have a good time and when Dryden fumed at “the steaming ordures of the stage.” The Country Wife is generally conceded to be the best of William Wycherley’s four major comedies. It holds up dullness as the worst of sins, wit as the greatest virtue. If it preaches anything at all, it is that sex is, at bottom, a laughing matter. The play was revived on Broadway by Augustin Daly, in a heavily bowdlerized version, 52 years ago.

Last week it was revived again, in a scintillating, frolicsome production by Gilbert Miller. This time the cutting was done for the sake of compactness, the bowdierizaions being restricted to two or three of the Droadest Anglo-Saxon monosyllables. Libidinous high point of this show is not in the script at all; it is the direction of Lady Fidget’s glance when a rakehell named Horner assures her that he is not, after all, a eunuch.

Mr. Horner (Roger Livesey) pretends to be emasculated because his reputation has become such that he is hard put to circumvent the vigilance of jealous husbands. This ruse works well enough in the case of Sir Jasper Fidget, who is only too glad to have such an apparently harmless gallant squire his wife around town, frequent her boudoir. But Mr. Pinchwife, who has brought an artless country wife to London and is in a fine frenzy of determination not to be cuckolded, has not heard the rumor about Mr. Horner and so goes to great lengths to keep him away, finally deciding to divert Horner from his wife by taking him his sister. Mrs. Pinchwife (Ruth Gordon), however, learns city ways so fast that it is she, bundled up and masked, who is escorted to Mr. Homer’s chambers where the play soon reaches a logical conclusion.

The comedy is shamelessly and fittingly overacted by a capable cast which comes to the footlights, leers at the audience when delivering asides. Acting honors go to Comedienne Ruth Gordon, whose artfully naive mannerisms are perfectly suited to the part of Mrs. Pinchwife. Best laugh in the show is the situation, often drawn for The New Yorker by Peter Arno, of a duped husband coming upon his wife in another’s arms. In this case old Sir Jasper Fidget is the cuckold and his remark, greeted with wild laughter from the audience, is a mild “how now?” Born in Wollaston, Mass., now a widow of 40, professionally eccentric Ruth Gordon (Serena Blandish, Saturday’s Children, Three-Cornered Moon, They Shall Not Die, Ethan Frame) is said to like gefullte fish, poppyseed tarts, icecream sodas, Clos-Vougeot, Marcel Proust, Groucho Marx, alley cats, French poodles.

She never goes to bed before 3 a. m., sleeps with a black blindfold, considers it fun to open charge accounts. She writes personal letters on a typewriter, has had lunch twice with George Bernard Shaw, is of airplanes, taxis, trains, subways, refused to act with animals on the stagesince a bulldog bit her in Seventeen.