Theatre

The London Cuckolds (National Theatre) Brief Lives (Duchess Theatre) The Normal Heart (Man in the Moon) Kat and the Kings (Vaudeville)

Bed and bawd

Sheridan Morley

Restoration comedies frequently get revived, at least by those of our surviving subsidised companies that can yet afford them; but they very seldom get totally reborn. That miracle, however, is precisely what has now happened to Edward Raven- scroft's 1681 The London Cuckolds at the Lyttelton.

In his National debut as rewriter and director, Terry Johnson (he of Deadfunny and Insignificance and Hysteria) has taken one of the longer-lost satires of the late- 17th century and reworked it as a won- drously knockabout farce, one that could now well be retitled No Sex Please, We're History.

Take three beautiful wives, three ludi- crous husbands, a rake and assorted other Londoners of the period, and have them open the evening with a long, lascivious dance routine which leaves us in no doubt that bed and bawd are to be the main order of the evening.

At a time when all too many comedies of this and other periods are hauled out of shape and original meaning to accommo- date modern susceptibilities of feminism or other political correctness of the moment, the joy of Johnson's production is that it leaves Ravenscroft uncensored in all his incorrect glory. The director has drawn energetic and brilliant performances from a large cast, not least Caroline Quentin of, suitably enough, the television sitcom Men Behaving Badly, and by taking this complex plot of mismatched marriage at a cracking pace, Johnson achieves an exuberantly physical sexual satire of betrayal and bed- room confusion which shoots thousands of volts through a long-neglected and some- times creaky script.

Were Ben Travers or Ray Cooney to have lived three centuries ago, this is pre- cisely what they would have written, but Johnson's genius is to bring out an Ayck- bourn side to the play as well, so that in among the laughs we still get some thoughtful asides on the age-old battle of the sexes in a then very male-dominant society.

At the Duchess, 30 years after Roy Dotrice pioneered the marathon solo, Michael Williams is batik in Brief Lives as John Aubrey, the 17th-century antiquarian, magpie collector, eccentric and gossip first brought to television and then the stage by the adapter-director Patrick Garland.

For two hours, and indeed the interval during which he nods off still on stage, Aubrey reminisces about the bedroom exploits of Sir Walter Raleigh, the odd jaw- bones of Sir Thomas More and the sexual No, we're off the wall, you need next door, they're on the wall.' habits of the Court c.1680, all the while as if muttering away to himself.

Giggling, spluttering, coughing, whisper- ing, John Aubrey seems to have total recall of everyone he has ever met or insulted; if you can imagine an unholy 17th-century mix of Alan Bennett and Alan Clark you will have some idea of the private life of a born diarist whose insights into the people and places of his long lifetime tell us far more than any history book of the period.

But where Dotrice was angry and abra- sive and abusive, Williams is too often merely cosy and clubbable, though he nice- ly conveys a man whose brain is now run- ning faster than his body; some of the energy seems therefore to have drifted out of Garland's hugely intelligent and evoca- tive scripting of a lost world of Elizabethan gossip.

Currently celebrating its 15th year with no subsidy of any kind, the tiny but enter- prising Man in the Moon pub theatre at the foot of the King's Road, Chelsea, is reviving the first major Aids play, Larry Kramer's The Normal Heart, originally seen over here with Martin Sheen at the Royal Court in 1986.

Yet this is no period piece; it is a still sadly topical account of Aids victims and the constant uneasiness of the Establish- ment in deciding how best to treat them politically and socially as well as medically.

A great cry of journalistic and dramatic rage, it indicts then-President Reagan and Mayor Koch for doing too little and com- ing too late to the rescue of a gay commu- nity already beginning to be decimated by plague. Its title is from an Auden poem which also includes the line 'All I have is a voice to undo the folded lie', and Kramer's play is at least partly autobiographical in that he too was sidelined from his own organisation for shouting too loudly in political and social frustration at a funda- mentally anti-gay world.

`Who cares if another faggot dies?' is one of the central questions of a still heart- rending script, and it is that sense of rage and despair which gives a raw play its tremendous energy and emotional depth. John Guerrassio as the crusader, Warren Katz as his straight lawyer brother and Monica Emesti as the paralysed doctor are all superb in Richard Bridge's taut produc- tion. There is one other line from that same Auden poem which still reverberates here: 'We must love one another, or die.'

Briefly, Kat and the Kings (Vaudeville) is the small-scale South African musical about the hotel porters turning themselves into a close-harmony cabaret group by night; I raved about it at the Tricycle last summer and see no reason to alter that enthusiasm now.

And, sadly, in the last few days we have lost one of our greatest classical and con- temporary actors, Daniel Massey, perhaps best known for his Furtwangler in Taking Sides a couple of seasons ago, as well as the dramatist Beverley Cross, who gave up a promising playwriting career to marry and support his beloved Maggie Smith whom he had first met in the late 1950s when both were in Oxford. They got together again after several other marriages, but theirs became for more than 20 years the ideal, and he will be deeply missed.