Top of the Pops with silk tights

Here are three roles all actors love to play. The drunk (no need to learn your lines), the dementia victim (ditto) and the aristocratic roister-doisterer humping his way through the brothels of restoration London. Nothing quite beats the 17th century. Great costumes, stylish language, shoes that add three inches to your height, and a parallel universe of moral licentiousness where every cleavage is there be ogled and every passing bottom pinched. It’s Top of the Pops with silk tights.

Into this land of platitudes walks Dominic Cooper, a super-smooth baddie, who has very little warmth or humour about him, and not a trace of vulnerability. Excellent qualities, it turns out, for the role of John Wilmot, Earl of Rochester, a scribbling philanderer known for his lewd celebrations of erotic excess. The play makes a virtue of Rochester’s misanthropy, and in the opening lines the wicked Earl challenges the crowd to dislike him. He then ambles through a checklist of predictable scenarios. Whores are fondled, wives spurned, grandees mocked, oiks kicked, servants showered with gold. The play suffers from a lack of narrative focus and from several glaring anachronisms. A pregnant actress rejects the Earl’s proposal of marriage claiming that the delights of pursuing a stage career in London, while mothering a bastard, are infinitely preferable to living as a countess and raising her child as the heir to a peerage and a fortune. The only character who can stand up to Rochester is Charles II (Jasper Britton), who grants him a valuable commission, adding, ‘Don’t fuck it up.’ Which is momentarily hilarious. And emblematic of the show’s ambition. A pouty-lipped actor in a Brian May wig saying a naughty word.