The culture wars are over. At least that’s what Lisa Nandy thinks. In her first speech to staff at the Department for Culture, Media and Sport, Nandy said the British had “found many ways to divide ourselves” and instead planned to serve the country by “celebrating and championing the diversity and rich heritage of our societies and the people within them”.
This is not the fighting talk of someone responsible for fixing a broken sector of the British economy, and he would do well to prove his worth with some sensible proposals, such as fixing visas for UK artists and returning arts subjects to the heart of the National Curriculum. Most cultural practitioners are already left-leaning and would have approved of the above remarks long before he uttered them, so much of it rings a little hollow.
Nandy is, in any case, overly optimistic about the culture wars. Last week it was reported in The Stage that Restoration comedy would no longer be on the Rada curriculum; despite it being an important part of “our rich heritage”, it seems to me that those at Britain’s best-known drama school have given it little more than superficial consideration. For example, a document of student suggestions from 2020 described Restoration comedy as “a particularly conservative form (very white, very period)” – and while the part in parentheses is clearly true, I think these young shavers are mistaken about its conservative nature.
Restoration comedy is definitely difficult. The language is complicated, the plot is very complicated, and the humor can seem very unfunny. Of course, that’s true of many of Shakespeare’s comedies, and I can’t see anyone trying to cancel Much Ado About Nothing. I sometimes think the problem with works like The Country Wife (William Wycherley) and The Way of the World (William Congreve) is that people are overwhelmed by the history of the plays that were done in the mid- to late-20th century. It was something I endured a lot as a kid: fruity-voiced theatergoers winking at the audience as if we understood every nuance of the humor, and not really thinking about the psychology of the situation.
But Restoration comedy is interesting. Like one of those Magic Eye posters that adorned dorm walls in the 1990s, you have to look closely to understand it, but the process can be immensely rewarding.
Nicholas Hytner’s wonderful take on George Etherege’s The Man of Mode, staged at the National Theatre in 2007 with Rory Kinnear and Nancy Carroll, presented the play’s narcissism and masculine ruthlessness to devastating effect. Indeed, while misogyny is almost always rife in plays from this period, playwrights have hardly forgotten to give women humour or power. Congreve is particularly good: characters like the heiress Millamant in The Way of the World overcome questionable plots with knowledge and wit.
There is an assumption that restoration comedy is something creaky, gelatinous and therefore difficult to reshape for any era other than its own. This is also wrong: the genre has proven particularly relevant over the last 60 years. The sexual frankness and female adultery in works like The Country Wife struck a chord with those who embraced the tolerance of the 1960s – which was why the Victorians tried to censor such plays, if they deigned to stage them at all – and the 1980s were much enjoyed with plays like Wycherley’s The Plain Dealer, which expressed that decade’s unabashed embrace of greed and excess and undoubtedly gave Left-wing directors a chance to kick Margaret Thatcher’s free-market economy.
Today, Restoration comedy speaks to us once again as we try to navigate this new age of uncertainty. 18th-century Britain was a ruthless place, rife with damaging gossip. As our chief theatre critic Dominic Cavendish put it last week, reviewing the Royal Shakespeare Company’s new production of Richard B Sheridan’s The School for Scandal , the play’s “immersion in a bubble-like society prone to gossip” is still keenly felt.
That the RSC still sees value in a work like The School for Scandal makes me wonder if the Rada’s decision to stop teaching Restoration comedy is not actually a mismatch rather than a symptom of our times. While the shutters are being pulled down among a politicised and vulnerable minority, there are signs that others are growing tired of our literary heritage being used as an ideological weapon.
Indeed, the arrival of Slave Play in London’s West End is an example of how the tide can turn. Jeremy O Harris’s 2018 American drama interweaves interracial desire with America’s troubling legacy of slavery. It arrived here to much hysteria and has often been described as the most controversial play of the year. Yet British audiences have yet to react strongly – when this newspaper spoke to first-night punters, their reactions ranged from vague anger to mild indifference – and many tickets have not been sold. Perhaps Harris’s play is already finding less resonance in the UK, but I think it’s also a sign that we’re less willing to engage in polarising debate.
As for restoration comedies, Rada needs to realise that these plays are in the canon because they are good; they are not included on reading lists to reduce modern teenagers to hot, angry tears. And yet teenagers are angry. Lisa Nandy seems to have a lot of work to do.