“Spring Break, Italian-style… with sex and violence around every corner! Swordfights! Disguises! Seductions! …[A] party that never stops!”

Unlike its hero, Theatre Erindale’s recent production of The Rover keeps its promises: energized by its youthful cast, strong physical comedy, and the stream of raucous parties that mark its changes of scene, this interpretation of Behn’s Spanish comedy is great fun to watch. Without dampening any of the plot’s scandal or spirit, however, director Melee Hutton and her cast are also more critical of the central rake-heroes’ masculinity than the play’s exclamatory advertisements might suggest. By reimagining what is typically a ‘low’ comic role, Ned Blunt, as naïve and blustering (rather than boorish), this production invites the audience to identify the bullying and one-upmanship among Blunt’s male friends as the real source of his problems – and to see this more vulnerable Blunt as a foil to the play’s equally unlucky woman in love, the courtesan Angellica Bianca. Marked as a pair by their shared isolation and parallel descents into disgrace, Blunt and Angellica Bianca appear here as similar victims of the dissembling Rover’s ‘toxic masculinity’. They are also the only main characters to end the play unmarried, and so act as similar ‘release valves’ for the comedy’s ambivalent conclusion, each the shadow side of the sexual double standards that the play’s final triple-marriage can never quite resolve.

First performed in 1677 by the Duke’s Company (and then again nearly every year from 1703 to 1750), The Rover; or The Banish’t Cavaliers was Aphra Behn’s most popular play. Adapted from Thomas Killigrew’s Thomaso, or The Wanderer, the play’s action is organized by two love triangles. In the first, Don Pedro attempts to arrange the marriage of his sister, Florinda, either to his friend, Don Antonio, or to the wealthy Don Vincentio, while Florinda attempts to secure her own marriage to Colonel Belville, the play’s sentimental hero. In the second, Florinda’s sister – Hellena – attempts to evade life in a convent by seeking out a witty match in Willmore, the ‘Rover’ of the play’s title and leader of a gang of exiled English cavaliers. As Anne Russell has observed, Behn makes two significant changes to Killigrew’s plot: in addition to splitting Killigrew’s single love story into halves (one ‘sentimental’ and one ‘witty’), Behn gives equal attention to the sexual adventures of her male and female characters. For most of the play, Hellena must compete with the courtesan Angellica Bianca for Willmore’s affections, and libertines and sentimental heroes of both genders find great opportunities for romance in disguise (and the occasional nighttime tryst). As part of Theatre Erindale’s “Uppity Women!” series for 2013-2014, then, the play is a great fit: the program celebrates Behn herself as the first professional woman writer in England, and all of the series’ advertising emphasizes The Rover’s special attention to women’s sexual freedom and self-determination.

As Executive Producer Nancy Copeland points out, however, in Staging Gender in Behn and Centlivre (Ashgate, 2004), the moral focus of The Rover has historically been defined by its casting. When top billing goes to the actor playing Belville (as, for instance, when Thomas Betterton took the role in 1677), the happy resolution of his sentimental love plot can seem to be the play’s central triumph; alternatively, when top billing shifts to the actor playing Willmore (as when Robert Wilks took the role in 1709), the libertine’s adventures and the virtues of free love can take centre stage. Perhaps because Willmore’s story also brings with it a bit more bawdy fun than Belville’s, Blunt’s star – and the status of his farcical subplot – has historically risen with the ‘Rover’. Surveying eighteenth-century reviews of the play, Copeland also notes that most complaints emphasize either Willmore’s sexual rapaciousness or Blunt’s disrobing scene, which suggests that the roles expanded together. Fortunately, Hutton and her cast don’t shy away from either potentially ‘indecent’ subject: playing Willmore, Nicholas Potter is an incorrigible – if undeniably charismatic – hound, and Evan Williams, as Ned Blunt, spends the entire second half of the show in his underwear. Otherwise, though, this production does not follow the historical trend towards centering either Willmore’s or Belville’s love plots. Perhaps because Theatre Erindale’s cast is composed almost entirely of third- and fourth-year students in the Theatre and Drama Studies program at the University of Toronto, Mississauga, neither Potter nor Adrian Beattie (as Belville) is given ‘top billing’ – but this seems entirely appropriate, as the whole play is exceptionally well-cast. In fact, as Hutton observes in her Director’s Note, these actors share a different quality that illuminates a new central theme for the play: youth itself, or the anxieties and opportunities of youth, and the challenges that come with trying to live a life of one’s own choosing.

Hutton is right to identify youthful vigour and commitment as the production’s defining characteristics. From the spirited sword-fighting to the coordinated dance sequence of the curtain call (set to Shakira’s “Whenever, Wherever”), this is an incredibly energetic show; even the hard ‘behind the scenes’ work of the crew – mostly junior students from the University of Toronto, Mississauga and the nearby Sheridan College Theatre Arts Technical program – is obvious in the spectacular masks and props used to mark the carnival sequences between scenes. The space that the show gives to physical comedy is especially effective in the scenes that Willmore and Hellena share. Both very funny actors, Potter and Eliza Martin (as Hellena) are equally comfortable with a pratfall – and, as demonstrated by their literal tug-of-war over the terms of their eventual marriage, their characters are here as well matched in physical strength as they are in spirit. More importantly, by giving Hellena the space to demonstrate that she can strut, dissemble, and otherwise act just like Willmore, this production makes it easier to believe that their marriage might be a happy one. Like Willmore, Martin’s Hellena is always upfront about her sexual curiosity: the play opens with her pacing, curious but already loudly opinionated about the sexual side of her sister’s married life, and in the play’s final scene, Hellena directly addresses the audience about the future of her chastity, inviting us to help her choose between “Heaven” and “the captain.” Likewise, though her ‘tug-of-war’ scene does nod to the tight line Hellena must walk to retain her respectability until she marries, Martin is otherwise straightforward about what her character really wants from Willmore: in the last moments of the play, after the curtain call but before the lights go down, it’s Hellena that leads Willmore back to bed, and it’s Hellena who blows out their candle with a knowing wink at the audience. Altogether, these moments help to resolve some audience anxiety that Hellena might have been duped by her Rover – because even if we never quite trust Willmore’s affection for anything other than Hellena’s money (or her body), she here seems to suggest that this Willmore, whatever he is, will perfectly suit her appetites, too.

Without these promises that Hellena and Willmore have met their match in one another, the triple-marriage of The Rover’s conclusion can feel a bit ambivalent. Given that only one of the couples involved knows both parties’ names before the scene begins, it’s hard to accept marriage itself as a roundly positive solution to the problems of inconstancy and sexual jealousy that have motivated so much of the plot – and the perfunctory chorus of apologies for no less than three rape attempts against Florinda doesn’t do much to suggest that the male characters have learned anything from their persistent failure to distinguish a ‘harlot’ from a ‘woman of quality’. At Theatre Erindale, however, some of this ambivalence is displaced: cast out of the happy marriage scene, and carried off stage by Ned Blunt and Angellica Bianca. An unlikely pair, these characters’ plots are connected mostly by their shared embarrassment: Ned is duped by Lucetta, a prostitute he has mistaken for a flirtatious young wife; elsewhere in Naples, Angellica Bianca is duped by the inconstant Willmore, persuaded to give up both her hard-won money and her love just as he shifts his attentions to the witty Hellena. Here, though, these two plots are mapped out the same way across the stage. Chiamaka G. Ugwu plays her part with regal dignity, but Angellica Bianca’s relationship with Willmore draws her further from her opening position of power with each act: she begins on a balcony, but steps down to stand over him while explaining that wives and prostitutes are similar sorts of commodities; she descends further, seated next to him, to admit that she still could fall in love; and finally, she must step down from the last riser at the back of the stage – pistol in hand – to hold Willmore, her ‘perjured man’, accountable for the promises he has broken. Likewise, though Williams’ Blunt never commands quite the same authority as Ugwu’s Angellica Bianca, his descent into disgrace looks very similar: he starts the play level with the rest of the cast, but Lucetta’s bed trick draws him down through a trapdoor and into a sewer – and so he opens act III, scene iv by crawling up out of hole in the stage floor, ‘all dirty’.

Both characters also end the play with a similarly painful speech, cursing love itself and vowing to punish those who have betrayed them – but Evan Williams, as Blunt, invites us to notice a new and subtler parallel among these two complaints. Climbing up out of the sewer, Williams’ Blunt is self-pitying (“I’m a cursed puppy!”), but not yet vindictive. Later, arms spread and his back pressed against the double doors at the back of the stage, Ned’s raging against “any mortal thing in petticoats” sounds panicked and paranoid, more motivated by his fear that his friends will break in and find him half-naked than anything else. In both cases, Williams’ Blunt is anxious about being emasculated – but he’s very clear that it’s the opinion of his male “comrades,” and not the play’s women, that will make or break his reputation. Even as he advances upon Florinda, vowing to “be revenged on one whore for the sins of another,” he’s blustering, one eye on the door, almost hoping to be caught – and he seems openly relieved when Frederick breaks in to “ruffle the harlot” for him. Williams’ Blunt is always looking to Frederick, Belville, and – most of all – Willmore for approval, and he seems resigned, at best, to what he needs to do with (or to) women in order to earn their good opinion. By drawing out this sense of resignation, Hutton and Williams invite the audience to recognize Blunt as Angellica Bianca’s masculine foil: like Angellica Bianca, the spurned lover, Blunt feels he’s been cheated for “believ[ing],” rather than doubting, the object of his affection; like Angellica Bianca, the famous courtesan, Blunt is also angry about the power he seems to give up by admitting that he’s looking for love, rather than money or sex. Taken together, Williams’ Blunt and Ugwu’s Angellica Bianca draw out the consequences – for both men and women – of the values that fire Willmore and Hellena’s seduction plot. In a play that otherwise asks us to celebrate the similar appetites and adventuresome attitudes in its witty heroes, Blunt and Angellica Bianca suggest that this cynical sexual exchange might come with its own costs, and they give voice to some real anger about the expectation that courtship, and masculine ‘seduction’ in particular, should be callous and violent. These are the moments that the production is at its best. Pitching Blunt’s raw fear of humiliation against Hellena’s self-determination through seduction, Hutton and her cast use The Rover’s ambivalent conclusion to ask timely questions about sexual violence and masculinity, and the play ends by inviting the audience – literally, as Hellena does – to make up our own minds about what it means to love the rake (or choose “the captain”).

Aphra Behn’s The Rover ran from the 13th March to 23rd March 2014 at the Theatre Erindale, Toronto.