THEATER REVIEW- The Rover

The Rover, first produced in 1677, was rediscovered by the modern theater in the 1980’s. Since then, its author, Aphra Behn, has enjoyed (as much as one can enjoy things from over 300 years of top-soil) the modest notoriety that comes with being one of England’s first female writers. Her admirers include hip feminists with degrees in English literature, and she has apparently earned her place as the queen of amatory fiction, a predecessor to Romance novels (the sparse criterion for the genre being that they deal with love and are written for women by women). I believe that evolution has been kind to the amour; at least now stories chronicling the task of “shackling-the-notorious-playboy-to-your marriage-bed-through-nothing-but-the-use-of-your-womanly-good-looks-and-wit” does not involve several callously dismissible attempts at rape in the plot. My aversion to such “charming” scenes of the wild-child rover’s manly aggression, is clearly more modern than would have been advisable for the ideal reception of the script.

“The Rover” himself is a bawdy sailor named Willmore (played with a goodly amount of devil-may-care by Tom Hunter), out on the town cavorting with his friends. Among the party is the steadfast (a notable rarity) and unlucky Captain Belivile; his lady love, Florinda, is bound by the will of her forceful brother to marry another. Willmore is no slacker and in the short matter of two nights manages to seduce both Florinda’s sister, Hellena, and Angelica, a high priced courtesan. Mistaken identities cavort with broken vows in this fast-paced 90 minutes condensation of the original, which has lost nothing but its crippling dependency on patience in the adaptation. The dialogue is witty ("How the devil came you so drunk?” “How the devil came you so sober?"), but it is scarcely Shakespearian verse. A lighthearted comedy with a starkly gendered dichotomy that personally makes me resent the playful “all’s well that ends well” of which the entire time period reeks. At the same time, I am well aware at how the play could have been read in a very different light; at some point the unlucky fool Blunt vows to take his anger at one woman on all their wretched kind, and perhaps (after several more drinks and lessons in revisionist history) I can be taught to see that this is where Behn meant to suggest that stereotypes are wrong. All in all, amusing but underwhelming, perhaps I just can’t appreciate the good ol’ days as much as I should?