Does Richard Have an Affinity for Rakish Roles?

RA mentioned in a recent interview the possibility that he might appear in the following restoration comedy. Is there another libertine in Richard‘s professional future? The male lead is indeed another rake…
The Rover or The Banish'd Cavaliers is a play in two parts written by the English author Aphra Behn. It was a very popular Restoration comedy.

Behn had famously worked as a spy for Charles II against the Dutch. However, Charles was slow to pay her for her services and slow to meet his promises, if he ever paid her at all, and Behn sought to make money first with her poetry, and then with plays and novels. The Rover appeared on the stage in 1677, and it was popular enough that a second part appeared in 1681. The play appeared for a long run, enabling Behn to make a fair income from it (the author received the proceeds from the box office every third night the play ran).

The "rover" of the play's title is Willmore, a rake and naval captain, who falls in love with a young woman named Hellena, who has set out to experience love before her brother sends her to a convent. Complications arise when Angellica Bianca, a famous courtesan who falls in love with Willmore, swears revenge on him for his betrayal. In another plot, Hellena's sister Florinda attempts to marry her true love, Colonel Belvile, rather than the man her brother has selected. The third major plot of the play deals with the provincial Blunt, who becomes convinced that a girl has fallen in love with him but is humiliated when she turns out to be a prostitute and a thief.

Contemporary feminist scholars often focus on the play's many instances of women vulnerable to rape, and the tragic results of Angellica's being jilted by Willmore. They see in these plot elements a protest against the powerlessness of women in Behn's time.

Willmore (who may have been a parallel to Charles II or John Wilmot, 2nd Earl of Rochester) proved to be an extremely popular character, and four years later Behn wrote a sequel to the play. King Charles II was himself a fan of The Rover, and received a private showing of the play.  http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Rover_%28play%29
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http://thisgaudygildedstage.wordpress.com/category/restoration-and-18thc-sex/
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Aphra Behn: still a radical example:  Three and a half centuries on, the Restoration's Mae West makes many of today's women writers look distinctly genteel. Whenever Aphra Behn is written about, Virginia Woolf's entreaty is usually pulled out to act as the opening line: "All women together ought to let flowers fall upon the tomb of Aphra Behn, for it was she who earned them the right to speak their minds."

Behn had a few female contemporaries but, unlike her, they were aristocratic and certainly not doing anything as vulgar as writing for money. These hobbyist writers would also usually warn potential readers with a notice that the following work was written by a member of the "fair sex", as though apologising in advance. Aphra Behn made no such apologies. She did not ask for permission or acceptance - and it was because she did neither that she proved to be so popular among the ordinary playgoers whose opinion so often goes unrecorded. Operating with striking success outside gender conventions, it was she who paved the way for other women to do the same. What's more, she included as much wit and bawdiness as she could muster, along with a sharp insight into both sex and politics. She was the Restoration's very own combination of Dorothy Parker and Mae West.

...She had worked as a spy for King and country, served time in debtors' prison, and been called a slut as a writer, not just in her own time but by a whole series of (male) critics since. Here was a woman who did not just appease and beg to be allowed to write to earn a living.

On a previous blog on literary time travel, Aphra Behn was mentioned as someone whom it would be an adventure to visit. But what if we could bring her here, to the present, just for the day? What would she think of a traipse around the bookshops and the writing of noughties women; booksellers' tables groaning under the weight of pastel book covers that, far from defying convention and questioning and confronting, actually conform to the oldest patriarchal conventions?  I'd like to think that her answer would be so bawdy and cutting that, even today, it would be unprintable.
http://www.guardian.co.uk/books/booksblog/2007/nov/13/aphrabehnstillaradicalexa
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The Rover - Southwark Playhouse, London:  During the Restoration, the plays of Aphra Behn were as popular as those of Wycherley and Congreve. Now they are often perceived as curiosities despite Virginia Woolf's assertion that: "All women together ought to let flowers fall upon the tomb of Aphra Behn‚ for it was she who earned them the right to speak their minds."

Review: The Rover - Southwark Playhouse - London
The women in The Rover use the carnival in Venice as an opportunity to win their heart's desire. Helena, whose brother has decided that she must enter a nunnery, dresses up as a Gypsy and then a page to win the love of the rover of the title, the philandering Willmore. Her sister, Florinda, defies her father and brother to marry the man she loves. It is an astonishing play for a woman to have written at that time, although there are limits to the women's agency: the courtesan Angellica remains a loser in this game of love and money, and you wonder how these lively women will fare within the confines of marriage. Behn wrote out of need, not because she was some kind of 17th-century proto-feminist, and her plays reflect the society of the time.

It would be good, however, to see a production of one of Behn's plays that subverts 17th-century theatrical and social convention, rather than playing to it. This isn't that production, although Naomi Jones's production has charm and freshness, particularly in the early intimate scenes that are played in the theatre's galleried bar area. Once in the theatre, the show never quite recovers its momentum, and the long traverse staging is hard on the audience and actors, many of whom do not have the technique to deal with the noise and a space that leeches energy.
http://www.guardian.co.uk/stage/2009/jul/09/the-rover-review
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Synopsis:  In a collaboration between the BBC and the Women's Playhouse Trust, this is an opportunity to see the stage production of Aphra Behn's restoration comedy on video. The play chronicles the adventures and misadventures of a group of British cavalier mercenaries in Naples at carnival time. A robust, dynamic and sometimes brutal look at relationships, sexual desires and sexual favours.
http://www.waterstones.com/waterstonesweb/products/aphra+behn/the+rover/4157974/