There is a violent, alcoholic husband, and there’s a cheating wife. Unable to legally divorce her husband, Lady Brute, the provoked wife, finds alternative ways to escape this depressing reality: she sets her eyes on another man. Were it not for the laughter, the jokes, the lack of (further) tragic events, and, quite simply, the fact that this is a Restoration comedy, the premise could be that of a tragedy. Although as recently as 2014 Professor Michael Cordner at York directed a staging of the play, the last national production dates back to 1980, when the National Theatre staged a winter version that ended with the characters skating on a frozen Thames, possibly to recall the cold 1683-84 winter.
What makes The Provoked Wife an appealing choice for artistic directors is the evident brilliance of the characters, who show as much life when they are on their own as when they are all together – in a way that few other plays can boast. The play was first staged in 1697, in what are generally deemed the final years of Restoration comedy, and it had therefore left behind the more overtly sexual plots of the first two decades of Restoration drama, but kept intact the theme of (unhappy) marriage. What ensues is the penning of nuanced and deep characters, ones that the audience finds both easy and difficult to side with. One example is Lady Fancyfull: what should a modern-day audience do with her? She is certainly insufferable, annoying, loud, egotistical. But time allows us to understand that she is forced to be so. The artistic choice of this RSC production to have her rid of her beautifying adornments (her wig and her makeup) towards the end of the play is not very subtle, but nonetheless an effective way to bring the attention back to how women are treated and perceived in this play and, more generally, in a patriarchal society. The premise of the play, as established, is a drunk violent husband, and that alone should suffice to elicit some thought about why The Provoked Wife is labelled as a comedy. With Lady Fancyfull too, one is not really sure how to react to her mannerisms. Defined from the start by what another man, Heartfree, thinks about her, Lady Fancyfull never stands a chance of being taken seriously. She is a fop, she is exaggerated, excessive, out of touch, and the intensity of the play’s ending finds relief in the rest of the cast laughing at her rather than with her. Even with various artifices and pretended manners she finds herself still unable to fit into this society and gives up – physically stripping down all her superfluous objects.
This RSC production intensifies the marriage dynamics of the play: the bitterness between the Brutes is heightened by transforming their bickering into more serious fighting. This helps to make the reasons for the Brutes’s problems more understandable, especially for modern-day audiences who may not fully appreciate the difficulty of divorce at this time. This is why, in this 2019 production, Sir John claims for two kisses in a row, and he gets them. And why he attempts to rape his wife, something absent from the original play, which makes the final two acts much darker. Revisited in this way, the dysfunctional marriage gives a modern audience tangible reasons for Lady Brute’s attempted unfaithfulness, as well as reasons to dislike Brute.
Yet Brute’s characterisation is not left entirely to his drunkenness and, in this, actor Jonathan Slinger does an excellent job. The consistent lack of sexual and romantic satisfaction with his wife leads him to alcohol abuse, which the audience is willing to justify. Slinger has amazing comic timing, which makes him the most human of all the characters: certainly the one with the most flaws. In places, this stretch towards a contemporary annoyed husband spoils the delivery of important lines which, if not enunciated, are not fully appreciated by the audience: in the important Act 3 Scene 1 when Brute suggests drinking to Constant’s mistress, he ‘coughs in the glass’ (p.128).[1] To this, he reacts by saying ‘If I had love enough to be jealous, I should take this for an ill omen. For I never drank my wife’s health in my life, but I puked in the glass’ (3.1. 102-4). Lines like this one seem to go unnoticed by the audience. This moody Brute that Slinger creates gives the character depth, more than the original Brute possesses, as well as human features which remove him from the simplistic definition of beast.
At the other end of this complicated marriage is Alexandra Gilbreath, whose Lady Brute is simply perfect: not one line is delivered too slow or too fast; her gesture, her mannerisms, and her enunciation are in line with the modern way of staging Restoration plays. When Gilbreath is on stage, it is simply impossible to take your eyes away from Lady Brute’s expert use of the space and exploitation of the other characters. She shows knowledge of human weaknesses and of the world she inhabits. Lady Brute deserves sympathy and, just like with the written play, it is hard to blame her for being unfaithful even when, diverging from the original play, she kisses Constant.
It is impossible to side with either husband or wife or, in fact, to side consistently with one character from the start to end, but the struggles faced by the women in the play, even with the humanisation of Sir John, should not be dismissed. One of The Provoked Wife’s main themes is virtue. Vanbrugh explores virtue, and more precisely what women want to do with it, at length but subtly, and this production picks up on it quite cleverly. In Restoration comedies characters are driven by the search for (apparent) virtue: fathers try to preserve that of their daughters; husbands ensure their wives possess it; future wives attempt to keep it formally intact. And there’s a lot of talk about virtue, but more talk than anything else; as one learns as soon as one becomes familiar with Restoration plays, sex is much more central. Lady Brute and Lady Fancyfull are clearly the main victims of this patriarchal concern and the two are more similar than they appear to be. They both attempt to change their situations and both, in different ways, fail. In attempting to change the state of things, both do so while protecting their virtue. The struggles they go through, Brute’s drunkenness and violence and Heartfree’s gratuitous judgment, are simply unparalleled in men. The poster of this production exemplifies this: it features Gilbreath and Caroline Quentin, who plays Lady Fancyfull, out of character, the former with half of Lady Brute’s makeup on and the latter without the important wig while holding a glass. There’s some solidarity in this image of two women who are not friends but who share, nonetheless, the female struggle of surviving a patriarchal system which puts them primarily under the judgmental lens. Given Brute’s depiction as a surly drunken and cheated-on husband, it goes without saying that men are not particularly successful either. It is also Constant’s decision to court a married woman and Heartfree’s seeming reticence in marrying Bellinda that make the men questionable in their intentions too.
This RSC production of The Provoked Wife, like most modern stagings of the play, uses the post-Collier version of the play for Act 4 Scene 1. The original scene had Sir John roaming the streets of London at night wearing a parson’s gown, just stolen from a tailor, and appearing in front of a judge for misconduct before final release. This scene, along with the bits of the play where female unfaithfulness is given prominence over virtue, was strongly criticised by Jeremy Collier who accused Vanbrugh of blasphemy and his female characters of a lack of modesty and virtue in A Short View of Profaneness and Immorality the following year. The post-Collier version featuring Brute wearing his wife’s clothes instead, and made widely popular by David Garrick in the following century, works particularly well here because it amplifies this constant fight, sometimes offered through parallel depiction, between the wife and the husband on which this production insists.
The ending of The Provoked Wife, often deemed anti-climactic, yet perfectly in line with the theme of unfulfilling and unresolved marriage, is open to interpretation as with every production of this play, and does not disappoint. This 2019 RSC production of The Provoked Wife is excellent. Together with Venice Preserved, with which it shares several cast members, it is a welcome opportunity to see Restoration drama in action. The RSC justifies the presence of these two important Restoration plays in their summer season as occasions to celebrate the 250th anniversary of Garrick’s Jubilee, which, according to the RSC, contributed to make Stratford-upon-Avon ‘the epicentre of the Shakespeare Industry’. Although that is true and the RSC has every right to celebrate the legacy of such an important actor, I would like to see Restoration plays integrated into all their seasons without specific reasons for them to do so, since they do it so well. Most of these plays work wonderfully on stage and, like The Provoked Wife, can easily appeal to modern-day audiences.
[1] John Vanbrugh, The Provoked Wife, in Sir John Vanbrugh: Four Comedies, ed. Michael Cordner (Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1989).
The Provoked Wife is at The Swan Theatre, Stratford-upon-Avon, from 2 May to 7 September 2019.