Restoration comedy

The actress continued with the National Theatre for another two years including a performance as Mrs Sullen in the Restoration comedy The Beaux' Stratagem in Los Angeles.

Writing in the Village Voice, Andrew Sarris found it “an ugly, joyless movie” despite dialogue “worthy of Restoration Comedy.”

It’s like a Restoration comedy run through a John Waters filter and sprinkled with Luis Buñuel itching powder.

But it’s instructive to note the immediate retaliation, in 2018, when the theater critic Quentin Letts, then writing for the Daily Mail, questioned the Royal Shakespeare Company’s casting of Leo Wringer, a Black actor, in a forgotten restoration comedy, “The Fantastic Follies of Mrs. Rich,” written in 1700.

It was an absurdly overabundant late harvest, so much so that he liked to chuckle ruefully about having become a character out of a Restoration comedy, in which an author collects all of his kudos on his deathbed and then doesn’t die.