‘Allow me to be frank at the commencement’, Dominic Cooper’s Lord Rochester states at the beginning of the new revival of Stephen Jeffreys’ 1994 play by Theatre Royal Bath productions, recently transferred to Theatre Royal Haymarket. ‘You will not like me. You will not like me now and you will like me a good deal less as we go on.’ Seldom has an evening at the theatre been so accurately, and damningly, described by its lead character. Terry Johnson’s new staging of The Libertine mistakes bustle for interest and bores rather than titillates. Yet, hobbled with a distracted and miscast leading man and, to be honest, a third-rate script, there is very little that could be done.
At this point, I must declare an interest. As a recent biographer of Rochester, I have spent years studying the man and his life, to say nothing of the poetry, so it would be difficult ever to come to a play like this with an entirely unbiased eye. Those of you who have seen the Johnny Depp film will know the basic plot, focusing as it does on the last few years in Rochester’s life, specifically his desire to turn the actress Elizabeth Barry (Ophelia Lovibond) into a great thespian, his uneasy love-hate relationship with Charles II, friendships with the age’s other writers and, of course, the sex addiction that would lead to his untimely death from syphilis, aged a mere 33. Other incidents in Rochester’s incident-packed existence, including his fighting against the Dutch in the Second Anglo-Dutch War of 1666 and his attempted abduction of his wife Elizabeth, are alluded to but not depicted.
Ophelia Lovibond and Dominic Cooper
There is absolutely nothing wrong in attempting to portray a man as complex and contradictory as Rochester dramatically in a more two-dimensional fashion; the play is supposed to be entertainment, after all, and questions of identity and Restoration poetry might be better left to the university lecture halls, provided that they’re bold enough to tolerate the four-letter words. And yet the problem here – as it was in the film – is that Jeffreys appears to have little understanding or interest in who Rochester was, portraying him in a bland and two-dimensional way. He appears; he writes some naughty poetry; swives a bit; dies. The Carry On-esque humour diverts briefly (there is a servant called Thomas Alcock, a detail drawn from life), but this is very thin gruel.
It doesn’t help that Dominic Cooper isn’t the right casting for a man who has to combine good looks and charm with a fierce, almost religious zeal in his dissatisfaction with the world as it stands. Cooper’s a handsome and charismatic actor who can sell the idea of Rochester the rake, and would probably make a fine Dorimant in a revival of The Man Of Mode, but has no handle on the wider issues explored by the part, preferring to go for easy laughs. Depp, for all the film’s faults, had a more sophisticated take on the man, and Cooper struggles to make his mark accordingly. The supporting cast are fine- I enjoyed Mark Hadfield’s woebegone Etherege – although Jasper Britton is cartoonish and camp as Charles II, at one point rogering a wench from behind while shouting ‘His spectre and prick are of a length’, itself a verbatim quotation from a satire that Rochester wrote about the king, and was banished from court due to.
If you know nothing about Rochester, and fancy an undemanding evening at the theatre with a few jokes, a bit of swearing and a moral at the end, this might just about pass muster. But for anyone who has any interest in the period, you’d be better off reading a good biography of Rochester or anything that explores the strange, rich Restoration world, something that you’d think from this evidence was little more than a few bewigged dandies rogering orange sellers. A huge disappointment.
The Libertine at the Theatre Royal Haymarket until 3rd December 2016. Production images by Alastair Muir. For more information and tickets please visit the website.
