JeremyNortham.net

Jeremy played Horner in Wycherley’s The Country Wife for the RSC. The play is a Restoration Comedy of Manners.

William Wycherley’s The Country Wife, written in 1675, is widely considered to be the most studied and revived comedy from the Restoration period. Initially banned for its bawdiness for close to 200 years, the play’s themes of money, marriage and sexual intrigue nonetheless still strike a chord of universal appeal with contemporary audiences.

The story centers on Horner, whose reputation as a seducer has become so widely known in London that husbands will no longer allow him to be around their wives. To counter this, Horner spreads a rumor that he has become impotent. Armed with his new reputation as a eunuch, Horner successfully gains access to other men’s wives, as they now feel their wives are “safe” from his advances. As new arrivals in town, Jack Pinchwife and his “country wife” Margery have not heard of Horner’s rumor. Jealous to the core, Pinchwife tries to keep his wife away from Horner, but to no avail. The intricate and intertwining plot speaks to the sex, lies and hypocrisy prevalent in the period––some things never change.

Review

“Jeremy Northam’s personable Horner shows us the acceptable face of Wycherley’s devious erotomane. Instead of putting the accent on his nihilism, his isolation from his male friends (who aren’t let in on the imposture) and his scorn for the women he services, the production gives him credit for being an independent spirit in an unlovely masculine world. Women, in this world, ‘serve but to keep a man from better company’ (ie other men), while for the most part the males are either so idiotically complaisant (like Simon Dormandy’s whinnying fop, Sparkish) or so mistrustful (like Robin Soans’s dour, obsessed Pinchwife) that they unconsciously collude in their own cuckolding. Horner’s clever deceit is mostly at the expense of the male sex, for while he dupes the women also, these two-faced dames are in the market for what he is prepared to slip them.”

Lusting out all over: Paul Taylor on Max Stafford-Clark’s production of The Country Wife at The Swan – The Independent