Staging Restoration Comedy

“This insightful book tells a neglected story: the history of RSC’s Restoration productions. It combines a loving history of RSC past performance, from the 1960s to the present day, with a bold manifesto for the future. Highly recommended!”– Professor Tiffany Stern, The Shakespeare Institute, University of Birmingham, UK 

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 and cultural meaning. 

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).