Staging Restoration Comedy

Since its 1967 production of Vanbrugh’s The Relapse, the Royal Shakespeare Company has been the world’s leading producer of Restoration Comedies. This book is the first to document and critique the company’s history of engagement with that repertoire. It reviews the spaces in which productions have been performed, design principles, casting, voicing, textual adaptation, musical direction, actor perspectives, and the problems of how to confront, adopt or depart from received notions of Restoration style. It goes on to posit that, for all the RSC’s explorations of Restoration Comedy, the company has maintained the repertoire as a fringe interest played out in niche spaces, while recycling many of the assumptions it claims to challenge, and that what is needed is the writer-led intervention seen in RSC and National Theatre adaptations of French drama from the same period. Only then can Restoration Comedy begin to engage wider audiences in new sites of political, historical andcultural meaning.

“The richness of this greatly enjoyable book is to be found in the way David Roberts deftly weaves together his deep knowledge of Restoration theatre with intensively researched and observed accounts of the way the plays of the period have been revived, reimagined and sometimes rediscovered by successive generations of theatre artists working within the Royal Shakespeare Company since 1967. For good measure Roberts also lightly sketches in the wider landscape of Restoration drama production by other companies. But the primary focus on the creative imperatives of RSC actors, directors and designers together with an illuminating discussion of the characteristics and varied effects on the actor-audience experience of the different performance spaces utilised for production, make for an invaluable record of a hitherto under-appreciated strand of the company’s work.”– Professor Claire Cochrane, University of Worcester, UK

David Roberts is Professor of English at Birmingham City University, UK. He has published numerous books and articles about Restoration and earlier seventeenth-century theatre, including the monographs The Ladies: Female Patronage of Restoration Drama (1989), Thomas Betterton (2010), Restoration Plays and Players (2014) and George Farquhar: A Migrant Life Reversed (2018), and editions, including Pinacotheca Bettertonaeana: the Library of a Seventeenth-Century Actor (2013), Congreve’s The Way of the World (2020) and An Apology for the Life of Mr Colley Cibber (2022). David has published articles in, among others, Shakespeare Quarterly, ELH, The Cambridge Quarterly, New Theatre Quarterly, The Review of English Studies and The Times Literary Supplement. Recent commissioned chapters include essays for The Oxford Handbook of Shakespeare and Music (2022), The Oxford Handbook of Restoration Literature (2024) and The Palgrave Handbook of Theatre Censorship (2024).