Fluttering fans and frippery are out in Restoration comedy - emotional reality is in. Tim Supple's bare-walled, stripped-down production of Wycherley's first play is commendably austere, but it is, if anything, let down by its author. In accurately diagnosing Wycherley's sexual cynicism, Supple also exposes his convoluted plotting.
"How," Harley Granville-Barker once asked, "could an audience both be clever enough to understand the story and stupid enough to be interested in it when they did?" Even if that's a bit harsh, it has a grain of truth. The main plot hinges on nocturnal malarkey in St James's Park and the predatory Ranger's pursuit of his masked mistress, Lydia, to the home of one Christina, by whom he is instantly smitten. But Christina's eavesdropping lover, Valentine, immediately assumes he has been betrayed. If only the twerpish Valentine would come out of hiding, he could resolve the whole imbroglio in a second; instead it rattles on for a couple of acts.
Wycherley was no great plotter; his real strength, like that of Ben Jonson, lies in his documentary observation. He paints a vicious portrait of post-plague and fire 1671 London where "park-time" is a code-word for sexual cruising, where the men are rapacious and the women venal. The best scene shows the puritanical Alderman Gripe seducing the youthful Lucy with the connivance of both her mother and a bawd. Carol Macready's serenely maternal pimp places her hand next to Lucy's mouth as if demanding money in exchange for kisses; and any idea that Lucy is a helpless innocent is banished by her lewd cry to Paul Bentall's supposed dancing master: "I don't see your fiddle, sir; where is your little kit?"
At times Supple makes Wycherley's brutal realism look even harsher than it already is: he not only has Lucy rend her dress to prove sexual assault but later shows Ranger hurling his disguised mistress to the ground with intent to rape. Indeed, Robert Bowman's beefy predator sometimes suggests that he's more a Queens Park than a St James's Park Ranger. But, in a strong ensemble, there is good work from Diana Kent as a voracious husband-hunter plagued with beauty spots, from Amanda Drew as the sexually tenacious Lydia and from Louis Hilyer as a manic coxcomb.
No lost masterpiece has been uncovered. But Supple brings out Wycherley's moral bleakness and confirms that Restoration comedy, which sees sex as a mix of naked appetite and financial gain and marriage as a form of inhuman bondage, is ultimately no laughing matter.
• In rep until October 12. Box office: 01789 403403.
