The Rover at the Southwark Playhouse

On the way out of Looking Glass House Theatre's production (at the Southwark Playhouse) of The Rover, I overheard a woman in the audience sum up her impression of the play to her husband with: Men always get what they want. He agreed.

Now, initially, I'm inclined to think that (spoilers here!) the largely happy ending of Aphra Behn's Restoration comedy of mistaken identity does seem to indicate that the men have all got away with their indiscretions and achieved marital bliss. And because Aphra Behn is one of our most famous – and earliest – female writers, she must have a proto-feminist message here (feminism as we know it not existing in the 1670s). Surely?

However, having heard this couple, I spent the next five minutes thinking of reasons to follow the “Er, hang on a minute” that I almost stopped them with. The thing is, the men emphatically do not get what they want in this play. On the contrary, the women are the winners in the final scene. Of the five female characters, only one has failed to gain anything she wanted at the start. The other four have had great success. Of the men, only one can be said to have gained what he wanted. All of the others have either lost out or been persuaded that what one of the women wants is also what he wants. Another only gets what he wants on condition that another women gets what she wants (and she does).

The inevitable failure of the men to get what they want doesn't stop any of Behn's Restoration fops and young blades (played by a young, swaggering cast) dashing about Venice with a youthful, wily kind of vigour that can't be healthy for extended lengths of time. The sense of relief that the exiled Cavaliers (including the Rover of the title) have avoided death from over-exertion, street duels and syphilis is strongly felt, and not just by those concerned.
That an audience can feel any sympathy at all for the randy Willmore – a helpless servant of beauty – is an achievement in itself. Sam Wilkins' Rover stalks the stage like a dog on heat, boyishly batting aside any attempt to make a decent man of him as he flits grinning from one affair to the next.

He chases women through the gloom of the Playhouse's traverse space, the torches on the wall spluttering to light carnival Venice. If that darkness were a little more complete, it might be easier to forgive the inconsistent application of the rule that no one in a carnival mask can be recognised by anybody – including their best friend or brother. To be honest though, that stretches credulity about as far as does the really rather easy forgiveness doled out by Rebecca Shanks as a butter-wouldn't-melt Florinda. Alright, so such easy forgiveness allows her and her sister to hasten to the marriages they want, but even so...three of her new husband's friends attempting to rape her on separate occasions...and she lets them off? She even gives one to her maid as a husband, with the idea that all of them will now be reformed gentlemen. Florinda and her sister (Natalie Macaluso's engaging, twinkle-eyed Helena) must really want these marriages.

And there it is again. It's the women that scheme for the marriages, not the men. While the men are rushing about drawing swords on one another and chasing skirts through the dusk, the women are plotting and tricking their way to weddings. How well they'll succeed in taming their roving men is another story (perhaps the subject of Behn's sequel some years later).

But sometimes, militant, anti-male feminists can have a habit of seeing violently anti-male messages in places where they simply don't exist. The point here is certainly not that men always get what they want. It is more that they are often violent and inconstant, almost child-like, until they find the right woman to give them a reason to mature. In fact, it's not even really all that feminist – if by feminism we mean something placing greater importance on women than men. It's a lot more even-handed than that, and all the better for it.