The history of Restoration Comedy in modern performance is one of false starts and blind alleys. Following the First World War, amateur groups like the Phoenix Society in the UK staged private performances for subscribing members; from there, a handful of plays by the likes of Etherege, Wycherley, and Congreve established themselves in the West End. Their high comic style, typified by mannered vocal and physical performances, manicured designs, and fanciful costumes, laid the foundations for the artificial or “camp” school that persisted into the 1950s. This tradition was exploded by the Berliner Ensemble’s visit to London in 1956: its production of Brecht’s Trumpets and Drums, his adaptation of Farquhar’s The Recruiting Officer, abandoned high comedy in favor of realism and social critique. Where earlier productions had internalized Charles Lamb’s 1822 pronouncement that Restoration Comedy presents the world as a kind of “fairy-land” (“On the Artificial Comedy of the Last Century”), Brecht provoked contemporary Britons to excavate their political, economic, and social substrata.

In Staging Restoration Comedy: The Royal Shakespeare Company, 1967–2019, David Roberts explores how these different interpretations of Restoration Comedy informed the approaches taken by subsequent directors, designers, and actors from the 1960s to the present. He concentrates on the Royal Shakespeare Company (RSC) because it displays a more sustained engagement with this repertory than any other company: between 1967 and 2019, the RSC produced sixteen such comedies, some of which, such as Aphra Behn’s The Rover (staged in 1986 and again in 2016) and Thomas Southerne’s The Wives’ Excuse (1994), prompt us to reflect on what actually constitutes “Restoration style” (4)—or whether such a thing even exists. In providing us with a history of all the RSC’s Restoration productions, Roberts nuances earlier assessments of this repertory by J. L. Styan, Deborah Kaplan, Simon Callow, and Suzanne M. Ramczyk, asking readers to reevaluate what demands these plays make on their performers, and what false assumptions theatre makers uncritically bring to bear upon them. Roberts’s study also usefully rounds out the existing scholarship on the RSC, which focuses on Shakespeare and other Jacobethan dramatists.

The Introduction establishes what Roberts means by “Restoration Comedy” in the context of the RSC’s programming: recognizing that definitions are often “elastic” (1), he deploys it as a catch-all term for the period 1660–1714, reflecting “the fact that many dramatists who cut their teeth on the late seventeenth-century stage continued to write after 1700” (2). As such, Roberts covers plays from The Man of Mode (1676) and The Way of the World (1700) to The Beaux’ Stratagem (1707) but declines to discuss some later eighteenth-century staples, like The Beggar’s Opera (1728) and The School for Scandal (1777), that enjoyed success at the RSC. Clifford Williams’s 1976 production of John O’Keeffe’s Wild Oats (1791) is the exception because of its influence on subsequent Restoration productions. Roberts shows how Restoration comedies often suffer in comparison with Renaissance repertory because they are seen as too formulaic and difficult for modern sensibilities: they are understood to rehearse time and again the same character types and tropes (rakes, fops, male libertinism, etc.), even as individual dramatists provide wildly contrasting responses to these conventions. Finally, Roberts explores the RSC’s “historic investment” in “‘the text’” (6), especially in its emphasis on blank verse speaking, and how this has impacted its approach to the prose-heavy scripts of the Restoration, which so often deploy language “infused with time-bound cultural references” (6).

Chapters 2 and 3 respectively establish the historiographical and performance contexts in which RSC Restoration Comedy developed. Chapter 2 shows how preconceived ideas of “Restorationness” (18) in the twentieth century so often determined how directors and performers approached these plays. On the one hand, a production such as Love for Love (Haymarket Theatre, 1944–5) utilized the high comic style to “provide relief” to war-weary audiences—“Restoration” equaling here “a return to established practices and assumptions about social hierarchies” (10). On the other hand, The Recruiting Officer (National Theatre, 1963) was a far more grounded production, disrupting the audience’s sense of historical distance through realism; the actors there “revealed social division rather than revelling in it” (10). Despite their differences, both these approaches are “haunt[ed]” by the supposed “spectre” of Restoration style (12). Chapter 3 turns to The Swan Theatre, the venue of most RSC Restoration productions. Roberts notes that this theatre offers ample opportunity for intimate communion with the audience and that its acoustics make it perfect for live music, two elements essential to Restoration Comedy. However, he also cites testimony from acting and directing stalwarts attesting to the challenges the space poses for performers: it is vocally demanding; there is a major “‘eye-line problem’” (30), and designers like Bob Crowley find it hard to make The Swan “‘yield’” to their specific requirements, whatever the play (31).

Chapter 4 comprises the core of the book: a chronological history of each Restoration production, from Trevor Nunn’s The Relapse (1967) to Phillip Breen’s The Provok’d Wife (2019). Drawing on the RSC archive as well as reviews, Roberts charts the ways in which individual scripts were rewritten, as well as how designers and performers brought their own artistic visions to the repertory. His descriptions of the productions are high on detail and will prove valuable for theatre historians seeking to recreate the look and feel of a particular production. However, given the emphasis here on design and physical performance for establishing an RSC “style,” it might have been helpful to include some photographs from the archive. Without such a visual reference point, it becomes increasingly difficult to distinguish one production from another.

Chapter 5 comprises a brief “Manifesto,” calling for a more writer-driven approach to the repertory. Roberts sees RSC Restoration Comedy as hamstrung by an overly purist commitment to original text: “what this repertoire cries out for is a commitment to more thorough-going adaptation—the kind that creates its own world instead of picking and choosing from a design rail of different styles” (72). He points to the recent successes at both the RSC and NT with inventive translations of Molière, Racine, and Goldoni: “Let us imagine instead what The Way of the World might look like if transported out of white, privileged London to a postcolonial locale, for instance” (83).

Roberts’s book is a valuable contribution to the histories of the RSC and Restoration Comedy in performance. It prompts theatre historians to think more skeptically about the traditions and styles that continue to shape how theatre makers engage imaginatively with this repertory. Although the full history of Restoration Comedy on the modern stage remains to be written, this book lays the foundation for that future enterprise.