1989

The Rover by Aphra Behn

State Theatre Company of South Australia
The Playhouse, Adelaide, June 1989.
then York Theatre and Seymour Centre, Sydney.

Reviewed by Murray Bramwell

“All women together should let flowers fall on the tomb of Aphra Behn … for it is she who earned them the right to speak their minds.” Thus wrote Virginia Woolf in A Room of One’s Own. But it would be mistaken to perpetuate the notion that Behn was the first, or only, woman playwright of the Restoration. She was the first to make a living but she was not alone.

In the hundred years between 1640 (the year in which Aphra Behn was born) and 1740, 123 plays were produced by more than thirty women playwrights. As Fidelis Morgan, in The Female Wits, sardonically observes – in the period 1661 to 1720 there were more plays written by women performed in the two patent theatres in London than in all the London theatres for the sixty years between 1920 and 1980.

Written in 1677, The Rover is Behn’s most celebrated play and, like many hits, it produced a sequel- cunningly named The Rover Part II- which appeared four years later. Typically of Restoration comedy, Behn has adapted recognisable elements from other plays, particularly Thomas Killigrew’s Thomaso, written thirteen years previously. Untypically, Aphra Behn has turned an intriguing farce about a pirate into an intriguing and often disturbing play about the piratical state of marriage.

The Rover introduces three sisters -two, Florinda and Valeria face the prospect of arranged marriages, the third, Hellena, life as a nun. During carnival time they elude their custodial brother Don Pedro and, in disguise themselves, reveal the contradictions and, at times, viciousness of the gallants (and prospective husbands) Belvile, Frederick and Willmore, the Rover himself.

Behn’s play relentlessly reminds us that, for a woman, love is a transaction for money, male protection and respectability -and marriage is an offer of all three. The most successful women in the play are virgins who bargain for a wedding ring. Others like Lucetta, the canny young whore, gull buffoonish country gents like Ned Blunt only to be themselves enslaved by pimps like Sancho. Angellica Bianca, Behn’s most fascinating creation, is a courtesan made wealthy by the fickleness of male love who is herself seduced and betrayed by Willmore’s courtly epithets. Persuaded that she is priceless, in rejection she finds herself valueless.

The State Theatre Company of SA production was warmly received when it opened in late June this year and it now returns for a summer season in the Festival of Sydney. The timing can only enhance the carnival atmosphere since director Gale Edwards has shifted the setting of the play from Naples to the Spanish West Indies and the ambience is Carmen Miranda out of Armfield Twelfth Night.

Ken Wilby and Mark Thompson have designed a double-storey Spanish colonial set sprouting palm trees, festooned with party lights and back-lit (by Nigel Levings) like a rum commercial. The sense of fiesta, the bird-of-paradise costumes and comically mannered performances make The Rover an entertainment full of surprises and deservedly a winner for the company.

There are questions about the balances on the production, however, which Gale Edwards acknowledges in her programme notes as matters for consideration. The Rover is a comedy with an uncomfortable message and a director must decide how much it should confront an audience and how much it should console it. On first night the hisses and catcalls from the house when John Howard’s Willmore was being particularly vile suggested that some of the issues in the play were active and real. But despite an excellent performance in the Adelaide season,Pamela Rabe’s Angellica Bianca was kept out of dialectical contention by a stage-Spanish accent and quasi-comic wig and costume. She is a rival to Hellena but her challenge is unreasonably diminished. Her speeches are just as powerful-in fact, more so- but it is as though she has to perform them wearing a large false nose.

Since the production is unchanged from the Adelaide season, I can confidently predict performances of uniformly high standard. I have already mentioned John Howard’s urbane self-irony but not his nonchalant physicality.Elspeth Langman, Ann Looby and Merridy Eastman together work well as the sisters; Brendan Higgins’ Don Pedro is both amusing and sinister, like a feckless Captain Hook, and Bob Baines is first-rate as Ned Blunt, never overdoing the Essex accent, a wally but, he reminds us, a potentially dangerous one; it is a skilful performance. In minor roles, Dorinda Hafner, Nick Hope, Emma Salter and Lucia Mastrantone also offer memorable work.

Gale Edwards has assembled a strong team with Wilby and Thompson and Nigel Levings -and choreographer Michael Fuller’s fight scenes are not only excellent but a good test of the carpentry. All contribute to the vitality and theatrical precision of the production. It is possible on the evidence of the text, to present The Rover as the darkest problem comedy possible; it is as nihilist as Orton and as socially scathing as Caryl Churchill. The State version is lighter than that but by no means frothy- no-one could use that ghastly word `romp’ to describe it. But I can’t help wondering what a production of the play would be like if the emblematically named Angellica Bianca really had demolished the equally symbolic Willmore when she had the chance.

“Marriage Lines” The Sydney Review, January, 1990, pp.22-3.