The Country Wife, Southall Style: Restoration Comedy and the Multicultural Gaze

Sara Soncini

doi:10.1515/jcde-2022-0021

Article

The Country Wife, Southall Style: Restoration Comedy and the Multicultural Gaze

Sara Soncini
is Associate Professor of English Literature at the University of Pisa. Her main research interests lie in contemporary British and Irish drama, modern-day reproductions of Shakespeare (performances, translations, adaptations), Restoration and eighteenth-century theatre culture. She is the author of Playing with(in) the Restoration (1999), on twentieth-century rewritings of Restoration drama; Forms of Conflict: Contemporary Wars on the British Stage (2015); Le metamorfosi di Sarah Kane (2020), on the Italian afterlife of Kane’s work; and, more recently, The School for Scandal: Superfici, a monograph study on Richard Brinsley Sheridan’s comic masterpiece (2022; with Sylvia Greenup). Her edited volumes include Myths of Europe (2007), Crossing Time and Space: Shakespeare Translations in Present-Day Europe (2008), and Shakespeare and Conflict: A European Perspective (2013).

Published/Copyright: November 25, 2022

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From the journal Journal of Contemporary Drama in English Volume 10 Issue 2

Abstract

First performed at Watford Palace Theatre in 2004, Tanika Gupta’s version of William Wycherley’s The Country Wife (1675) relocates the Restoration classic to twenty-first-century London, reframing its libertine plot as a witty satire on sexual and gender mores in contemporary Britain. In this new setting, Wycherley’s comic masterpiece is revisited from a multicultural perspective, and his merciless exposure of social hypocrisies becomes infused with the adaptor’s keen awareness of diversity and its complexities. This article draws attention to Gupta’s play as a culturally significant intervention in the reception history of Restoration theatre culture. By opening up Wycherley’s comedy to the representation of Britain’s “new ethnicities,” I suggest, Gupta’s work has paved the way for the more inclusive, multiculturally conscious approach to the Restoration canon that is observable in the new spate of revivals and adaptations produced during the last decade or so.

Keywords: adaptation; multiculturalism; Restoration drama (revival of); William Wycherley; Tanika Gupta; The Country Wife

About the author

Sara Soncini

is Associate Professor of English Literature at the University of Pisa. Her main research interests lie in contemporary British and Irish drama, modern-day reproductions of Shakespeare (performances, translations, adaptations), Restoration and eighteenth-century theatre culture. She is the author of Playing with(in) the Restoration (1999), on twentieth-century rewritings of Restoration drama; Forms of Conflict: Contemporary Wars on the British Stage (2015); Le metamorfosi di Sarah Kane (2020), on the Italian afterlife of Kane’s work; and, more recently, The School for Scandal: Superfici, a monograph study on Richard Brinsley Sheridan’s comic masterpiece (2022; with Sylvia Greenup). Her edited volumes include Myths of Europe (2007), Crossing Time and Space: Shakespeare Translations in Present-Day Europe (2008), and Shakespeare and Conflict: A European Perspective (2013).

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Published Online: 2022-11-25

Published in Print: 2022-11-08

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Articles in the same Issue

https://doi.org/10.1515/jcde-2022-0021

Keywords for this article

adaptation; multiculturalism; Restoration drama (revival of); William Wycherley; Tanika Gupta; The Country Wife