Director Patrick Graham has always had a passionate inclination to confront audiences, twist conventions and pervert the natural course of our expectations.  His Theatrewhack cohorts totally come to the party for this production of seventeenth century female playwright Aphra Behn’s famously obscure smash hit (at the time) restoration comedy. 

Resplendent with purposefully deviant theatrical ideas and perspectives including but not limited to gender-reversal, anachronism, audience mobility, fourth-wall antics and water pistols, a colourful array of charismatic characters escort us through a convoluted series of adventures and escapades in the nature of love, honour and deceit. 

The company has certainly maximised the potential of Garnet Station’s Tiny Theatre ‘complex’, utilising two rooms and a pretty back garden in full summer bloom.  I infer from the programme’s absence of any production credits besides the cast that design of the subtly kitsch-centric indoor set has been an ensemble effort; so too the quietly composite costumes that vary in ostentation and abstraction from one to the next. 

Mark Oughton is Florinda, a popular lass with two would-be husbands as betrothed by her father and brother respectively, and the man she truly loves herself.  Florinda is the winsome idealist whose dress matches the curtains, and who dreams of marrying for true love and having five children in accordance with her purview of a woman’s entire purpose.

Andrew Parker is Florinda’s sassy, libidinous younger sister Hellena, dressed up like a naughty schoolgirl with a spiked dog collar and red devil horns despite, or perhaps because of, her impending destiny to enter the convent.  Obsessed with the idea of love, Hellena interrogates Florinda about her own romantic ambitions, being betrothed to one rich man by her brother, but all-consumed with love with for another. 

The girls’ brother Don Pedro is a beady red-eyed argyle sock puppet, with an apparent multiple-personality disorder given he is alternately portrayed by most of the cast members in different scenes, through windows or behind their backs.  His role seems mainly expositional, although his own salacious desire for a certain high-class concubine provides additional comical complication. 

Prema Cottingham is typically stiff-upper-lipped with honour and valour to spare as Colonel Bellville, the apple of Florinda’s eye (and vice versa).  In contrast to his pseudo-dapper demeanour, Courtney Eggleton has great energy playing Bellville’s burly best mate Blunt with blokeish gusto. 

Michaela Spratt plays the eponymous rover Willmore – a charismatic double-dealing gentleman rogue who has an eye for the ladies and a conveniently short attention span vis-à-vis his amorous promises – with a cavalier aloofness that beguiles those he engages with his equally cavalier charm.  Meanwhile, James Crompton is magnificently tragic as Angellica Bianca the most favoured and expensive new prostitute in town, destined to fall prey to Willmore’s seductive wiles. 

Rounding out the dramatis personae, Rachael Longshaw-Park plays three parts with notable distinction: Callis, dutiful Irish governess to the sisters, Moretta, sour and cynical woman-in-waiting to Angellica, and the eligible yet controversial Antonio, rival for both Florinda and Angellica’s affections depending which scene we’re in. Notably two of Longshaw-Park’s three characters are the actor’s own gender, just to prevent anyone becoming complacent with the understood order of things.

Set in Naples at carnival time, the casts’ accents are predominantly English and Spanish as per the respective characters’ nationalities, with the exception of the sisters who are presumably Spanish, being the siblings of Don Pedro, yet their accents are English. 

A handful of notably bawdy displays are kept light and demonstrative so that we are more surprised than deeply shocked by any overt depravity.  Occasionally the cast make a pointed acknowledgement of certain outdated, controversial attitudes around gender roles and coercive sex scenarios which tend to seem more self-conscious and forced than necessary. 

As mentioned already, the multi-stylistic theatrical format is surpassed only by the complexity of the intricate narrative which I shan’t attempt to comprehensively summarise here.  Some players seem a tad encumbered by the archaic language at times which can be mildly distracting but for the most part their collective energy and zeal sufficiently guide the diminutive audience (only twenty-odd seats folks) through two hours of increasing farcical mayhem.

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