The Rover, Aphra Behn’s most staged play, was first introduced to the contemporaries of Charles II in 1677, on the stage of the Dorset Garden Theatre. It has proved popular in the last thirty years, with several big and small productions across the country, which attract the audience with charming and entertaining characters, and invite scholars to further interrogations of gender, roles of femininity, and meanings of setting.

Thirty years after John Barton’s controversial adaptation, which incorporated some passages from Thomas Killigrew’s Thomaso, or The Wanderer (1664) and consistently paralleled sexual and racial issues in the attempt to make the feminist case clearer,[1] The Rover returns to the Swan under Loveday Ingram’s direction for the Royal Shakespeare Company. In this production, Aphra Behn’s most famous play is a whirlwind of sensuality, licentiousness, and diverse fun. Even before the proper start of the play, the captivating carnivalesque songs, delivered by flamenco-attired Astrea, Philippo and their band, establish the lascivious and mischievous atmosphere, a precondition for the story. Then the music quickly adapts to the bacchanalian celebrations following the prologue spoken by Hellena (Faye Castelow). The Rover’s Carnival is less of the Pagan rite meant to salute winter and welcome spring, and more of the Catholic celebration preceding Lent, when believers are asked to carnem levare, to remove meat. Therefore, it possibly draws on the Carnival as metaphor for the temporary and debauched time of courting before ‘the storms o’th’ marriage bed’ strike. After all, the Carnival is the pivot for the development of the story in The Rover, and the reason for the success of this production. It is rapidly accentuated by the entrance of a virile Willmore, endowed with rakish, tempting sensuality by Joseph Millson’s physique du rôle, which enthralls the audience until his very last lines on stage. His rough sensuality finds theatrical and physical relief in the voluptuous beauty of Angellica Bianca, a courtesan ‘to be sold’, played splendidly by Alexandra Gilbreath.

This openly sexual thread of the play is contrasted at regular intervals by the livelier duo of Hellena and Florinda, sisters to Don Pedro, who has chosen a nunnery for the former and a husband, Don Antonio, for the latter. They are the foil to Angellica and Willmore as they are frank and open about their feelings and plans, although forced to disguise as gipsies to take part in the Carnival and accomplish their plans.

But the Carnival, heavily and cleverly played up by Ingram, is the real pivot and turns the tables to shuffle the characters’ personas. The metaphorical masks of two characters, Angellica and Blunt, easily fall off. It is during a time of disguise, cheating, and trickery, that these apparently carefree and stock characters develop to reveal deeper and more colourful hues. Although the comical tone is kept through each and every encounter between Willmore and Angellica, the latter is offered to the audience in her vulnerability, as she ingenuously waives the money needed for her sale, and replaces it with the heart of the indigent rover. Merely one of his many sexual divertissements – or endless, as Willmore is interested in seducing practically any woman crossing his path – Angellica will learn the real nature of Willmore through suffering.

Even though the two actors manage to keep the tone light and mostly comedic, with spontaneous bursts of laughter adding fun to the show, the following development of events, with an enraged and heartbroken Angellica attempting to shoot Willmore, starts to show the dark hues of a seemingly polished and lighthearted story.

The Carnival of disguises claims one more victim, Blunt, an English gentleman from Essex, as he reminds the audience. Blunt is supposedly friend of the rakish men of the play, but he is easily tricked by Lucetta, a wench, and robbed of his money and goods before disappearing into the trapdoor. His comeback on stage reveals a revengeful and ruthless Blunt, whom Leander Deeny gifts with brutality and strength, as he attempts to rape Florinda. This potential rape associates Blunt with Willmore, as the latter also tries to rape Florinda while she is waiting to encounter Belville at the Garden Gate. Willmore, enticed by another gipsy – his conquest Hellena is also disguised as one – attempts to sexually abuse her.

The depiction and reception of female agency of The Rover are complicated, in the original text as well as in this RSC production. Since Ingram largely insists on the carnivalesque element, it is only apt to use it as the lens offered to consider the women of the play. On the one hand, the Carnival enables them to experiment and to join the promiscuous celebrations; dramatically speaking, it enriches the play with wonderfully developed and unpredictable characters. On the other hand, the movement of these women is very much restricted to the dichotomy of the lady and whore: the courtesan for sale, Angellica, will experience the true love, and the witty Hellena will transform into a sensual gipsy. Every action of the women in the play is plotted as a response to Willmore: the rake, the lover, the womaniser, the rapist, and the rover. Willmore is the only character that does not develop. Far from showing signs of redemption at the end, he closes the play à la Dorimant, apparently fallen for the wittiest of his conquests, only to reassure the audience with a smirk at the very end; as a true libertine, he proves to be purely interested in satisfying his sexual needs and financial necessities. The poster of the production shows a charming, laughing Willmore with a lipstick mark on his forehead, clarifying for the audience the most important role of this play.

With The Rover, the Restoration comedy returns to the Swan a year after William Congreve’s Love for Love. They were both very good productions, although The Rover is more accurate to the original text and characters. However, they are also popular managerial choices. With a new edition of Aphra Behn’s works currently under way for Cambridge University Press, there is hope that directors and managers will feel pushed to adapt more of her plays for the modern stage.

Differently from thirty years ago, more women playwrights from the Restoration have been brought to light and studied: Susanna Centlivre, Mary Pix, and Catherine Trotter, for instance, wrote extensively in the years after Aphra Behn. The Rover is clearly well-known and appreciated, and proves to work well in different periods, but it is important that theatre managers, as well as directors, approach equally valid contemporary texts, which would offer priceless depictions of the socio-political condition of the Restoration. For an iconic venue like the Swan, and a world-renowned company like the RSC, I would like them to consider following in the footsteps of smaller, although equally historic venues: The Rose Playhouse in London has recently successfully drawn the curtain on a two-week Festival with six Restoration plays by six different women playwrights, which was welcomed and enjoyable.

[1] Jessica Munns writes that ‘in seeking recognition of Behn’s relevance for today, Barton obscures the points at which we can find genuine parallels between Behn’s texts and our social context’, p. 19 (“Barton and Behn’s The Rover: or, the Text Transpos’d”, Restoration and Eighteenth Century Theatre Research, second series, 3:2 [1988]: 11-22). Similarly, Lois Potter argues that this ‘is not the play Aphra Behn wrote, and its attempts at introducing feminism are something of an insult to her’, p. 817 (‘Transforming a Super-rake’ review of The Rover at the Swan Theatre, TLS, 25 July 1986, 817).

The Rover, directed by Loveday Ingram, is at the Swan Theatre, Stratford-upon-Avon until 11th February 2017.