Performing Restoration Drama Today

The current Royal Shakespeare Company (RSC) season includes two of the most popular plays on the Restoration stage, Thomas Otway's tragedy, Venice Preserved(1682), and John Vanbrugh's comedy, The Provoked Wife(1697). Both plays held the stage throughout the eighteenth century and beyond but fell out of favor early in the nineteenth century and were revived with varying degrees of success in the early twentieth. Each was subjected to rewrites and revisions in order to stay in the eighteenth-century repertory. We tend to prefer the original versions. Each is regularly found on university reading lists. And each is regularly included in scholarly accounts of late seventeenth-century drama; both are usually held in high regard in these accounts. Where they differ, however, is in their stage histories over the past hundred years. Audiences warm to the comedies of the period while resisting the tragedies. The new RSC productions do little to challenge this difference.

One result is that the tragedies are performed far less frequently and fewer of them attempted at all. Venice Preservedis one of that few with something resembling a post-1900 performance history. Harold Pinter, who had hoped to direct it at the National Theatre because he saw it as "a play for our time," did not realize his ambition, but there have been a number of noteworthy productions: the pioneering 1904 Otway Society revival; the 1920 production at the Lyric Hammersmith with Edith Evans; Peter Brook's 1953 production, also at the Lyric Hammersmith, with John Gielgud and Paul Schofield; the 1969 Bristol Old Vic production with Alan Bates; the Prospect Productions' 1970 version; the 1972 production at the Citizens Theatre, Glasgow, the 1982 Almeida Theatre production, and the National Theatre production of 1984 with Ian McKellen and Michael Pennington. Venice Preservedclearly continues to attract the attention of first-rate directors and actors in prestigious venues, but their productions rarely live up to expectations, and audience response tends to be tepid at best. I attended the 1984 production with high expectations. The production failed to realize those expectations for me and for others who shared their responses with me.

Since Venice Preservedhas been a long-time personal favorite, I was eager for the RSC to redeem it in performance. But, once again, this was not to be. The large question I was left with is: Why is it so difficult for Venice Preservedto succeed on stage despite holding the admiration of critics and the interest of the best production teams in the Englishspeaking world? The great success of the original production owed a great deal to the strong cast, led by Thomas Betterton, Elizabeth Barry, William Smith, Anthony Leigh, and Elizabeth Currer; it also profited from addressing the political scene at the end of the Popish Plot, catering to the Court and Tories in ridiculing the defeated Whigs while revealing the vicious nature of their plot, and it can't have hurt that Jaffeir's conflict between love and friendship explored a tension central to any number of earlier tragedies and heroic plays. But by the century's end, its topicality was no longer relevant to its continuing success. Its morality had been questioned early in its history, and that questioning led by the end of the century to the removal of the Nicky-Nacky sub-plot. Critics also pounced on the confused motivation of Otway's characters and on his inelegant language. But they followed Dryden in placing the highest value on Otway's ability "to express the passions which are sealed in the heart by outward signs."

In The Spectator#39, Addison refined Dryden's approach for the new century by declaring that despite the plot of Venice Preservedbeing greatly flawed by its protagonists being "rebels and traitors," Otway follows "nature in the language of his tragedy, and therefore shines in the passionate parts, more than any of...