The Rover

The Rover chronicles the adventures of three impecunious cavaliers on the loose during Venice’s carnival. In streets filled with masked revellers, romantic rivalries and drawn swords, mistaken identities and sexual misadventures multiply with dizzying speed. Enterprising heroines in unlikely disguises fall prey to all sorts of hair-raising perils in Naomi Jones’ brisk, bright, good-humoured account of Aphra Behn’s comedy about Englishmen behaving appallingly abroad.

Sam Wilkin’s eponymous rover is an engaging, boyish rake, perpetually half-sozzled, and with the morals of a sewer rat. As Florinda, Rebecca Shanks survives a great deal of attempted ravishment with self-possession, and without recourse to the waterworks. Adura Onashile balances poise with passion as an unexpectedly susceptible courtesan. And Blunt, the hapless butt of an extravagant gulling, is played with impressive restraint and a wealth of compassionate detail by an appealingly modest Jonathan Warde.

In the cavernous spaces of the Southwark Playhouse the young cast do well to sustain their diction and clarity. A few lines get lost in the more chaotic melees and scene-shifts, but the swordplay, music and dancing sweep with boisterous energy through the show’s various playing-spaces. The promenade aspects of the production sometimes feel contrived, but pay dividends in the acquisition of a real bar and balcony. And as the actors dash about, Mika Handley’s glamorous costumes glisten seductively through torchlit gloom.

Behn’s impossibly neat happy ending is a triumph of blithe forgetfulness on the part of most of the play’s protagonists. Still, the prevailing mood of ‘what happens at the carnival …’ feels a bit of a cop-out given the seriousness of some of the sins being muffled by wedding bells. Ebulliently broad-minded, Jones’ production tends to skip over the deepening shadows that dog its heroes’ heels. But despite this unsettling oversight, The Rover remains a stylish, pacey and bawdily pleasurable entertainment.