Revivals of Restoration comedies up to the end of the seventeenth century were often coloured by politics; the Collier crisis initiated a long period in which decency became their chief controversy. Recoiling in shock from The Rover Part 1 in 1757, the reviewer for The London Chronicle recommended that ‘all managers [should remember] that this play was written in the dissolute days of Charles the Second; and that decency is, or at least ought to be, demanded at present’. The recoil did not happen suddenly, however, as the fortunes of The Country Wife illustrate.

Wycherley’s play was performed in London at least 150 times between 1700 and 1753. For twelve years it disappeared from the repertory, to be replaced by John Lee’s truncated version of 1765, which lopped all the bawdy jokes, and with them Horner himself. Pinchwife was reinvented as a sentimental hero gradually overcome with guilt at his ill-treatment of Margery. If Lee’s version was less adaptation than amputation, David Garrick’s 1766 The Country Girl went for total makeover. Horner becomes Young Belville, a sensitive soul who falls with melting sweetness for the innocent ward Peggy Thrift and eventually releases her from the clutches of her grumpy guardian, Moody. It took more than 150 years for The Country Wife to wriggle away from The Country Girl, and its first experience of freedom was in the airless confines of a museum-style theatre designed to reproduce minute details of period performance style (the text remained filleted, however). The Phoenix Society revival of 1924 and a subsequent performance at the Everyman Theatre in 1926 were historical reconstructions that focused on contrivances of gesture, intonation, scenery and costume – an approach that some would argue has been insidiously influential ever since. A similar production at the Ambassadors Theatre in 1934 prompted the critic of The Daily Telegraph to observe that it was only the mass display of Restoration camp that saved the play from being banned; the man from The Times, not noticing the cuts, was surprised at how clean the play was given its reputation.