The Libertine

This tremendous play about John Wilmot, the Second Earl of Rochester, very deliberately and artfully presents, like Wilmot himself, something to delight and repel everyone. Aficionados of the Age of Dryden will enjoy hearing its Poet Laurate’s lines beautifully quoted and discussed (‘When I consider Life, ‘tis all a cheat’) but may be shocked by Wilmot’s ribald satires in mock heroic couplets (‘In th' isle of Britain, long since famous grown / For breeding the best cunts in Christendom’). Conversely, some who are amused by the blunt whorehouse dialogue may be bored by the philosophical discourse, even in the same scene. Fans of Elizabethan and Restoration period pieces could for a minute resent the well-acted exposure of the immature acting conventions prevailing after Cromwell’s ban on theatres was lifted. But if you like the theatre, you’ll definitely love this highly intelligent production of British playwright Stephen Jeffreys’ witty, meaty tragicomedy, because it’s mainly about the theatre. Yes, Jeffreys sticks mostly to the historical facts of the extraordinary 33-year life of the Earl of Rochester, but casts him as something like Prince Hamlet’s spoiled younger brother.

Wilmot really did have a problem with authority, and the figure he acted out on most spectacularly was his friend and patron Charles II. When the king (Sean O’Shea) commissions what he hopes will be a dramatic masterpiece to immortalise his reign, Wilmot (Anthony Gooley) delivers a personal piss-take about dildos. (The play-within-a-play humbly titled Sodom, or the Quintessence of Debauchery has never been definitively attributed to Wilmot, but the opportunity to imagine it in rehearsal is well worth the dramatic licence fee.) The audience is made to understand that it has been deprived of many masterpieces that Wilmot had the talent and opportunity to write. Jeffreys staunchly denies us a heroic ending: the syphilitic alcoholic returns to his long-suffering wife, and unlike the traditional unrepentant Don Juan, he signs a full repudiation of his encyclopedic wrongdoings and converts on his deathbed. It’s a double downer. Nobody’s happy.

And Jeffreys doesn’t allow us any way to feel sorry for his anti-Hamlet. Instead of hearing Ophelia’s lament ‘O, what a noble mind is here o’erthrown’ (by difficult circumstances), we are led into a corner to draw our own moral conclusion about a brilliant mind that despite having every material advantage and intellectual liberty chooses simply to throw itself away, wasting its body on wine and whores. And this anti-hero is staring at us, telling us not to like him. Who would?

Johnny Depp must have had a career-suicidal tendencies to take the role in the 2004 film adapted by Jeffreys; perhaps he was sick of being so popular. The film is visually splendid, with extravagant locations and costumes and John Malkovich in fine form as the king, but the magic created in the little Darlinghurst Theatre by Sport for Jove directors Damien Ryan and Terry Karabelas on one thousandth of the budget competes impressively with the stars; it’s perhaps more effective because we are seated in front of a stage play about a real man, not in a movie cinema watching a movie star. The set of latticed mirrors and curtains by designer Lucilla Smith with appropriately simple footlights by Matt Cox yield scenes in the brothels and theatres worthy of the paintings of Wilmot’s contemporary Jan Steen. Two musical classics are deployed with brilliant bathos: Purcell’s ‘Dido and Aeneas’ (‘When I am laid... in earth’) sung by a whore on the job, and Handel’s ‘Zadok the Priest’, accompanying not the usual coronation but a slow-motion round of croquet.

The quality of the acting is good even in the minor roles (many doubled), particularly Sam Haft as Wilmot’s servant Alcock (no, that was his real name). It’s a terrific production of a great play: you may not like Jeffrey’s Wilmot, even if you like Wilmot’s poetry, but you will likely love Sport for Jove’s version of The Libertine.

Damien Ryan on The Libertine