The Country Wife

Juicelog Wed 020108: Pudz and I arrived slightly late and tipsy (from cocktails at Digby Trout) for The Country Wife (at The Haymarket Theatre) and ended up watching the first half of this restoration comedy from the gallery upstairs.

The Country Wife is a romp comedy set in London in which Horner (Toby Stephens) feigns impotence in order to lure and seduce the local females and wives into his trickster hands. The plot then thickens with Pinchwife (David Haig) trying to protect his newly acquired young and naïve bride, Margery (Fiona Glascott) from the interests of the other unsavoury men. Inevitably Margery winds up crossing paths with Horner leading to harmful consequences.

Utilising a set of a boyish blue (Horner's batchelor pad) and girlish pink (Margery's childlike bedroom) to represent the two sexes, the audience gets taken back and forth between the two storylines in a single rotation of these colourful sets. This version does mix it up with a modern day pool table and rakes wearing jeans underneath their traditional costumes.

This classic farce of naughty innuendos is cleverly written with some witty lines. The differences between men and women is well highlighted. For the more PC conscious amongst us, the role of women are shown to be in belittling light even though the men are also typecast as bumbling sexual predators. It does however succeed in tickling the audience with cheeky puns and double entendres, creating a piece that translates extremely well even by Juicy’s comical standards.