Expurgated versions
The bawdy elements of The Country Wife inspired multiple adaptations to bowdlerise it. The first was by John Lee, whose 1765 revision eliminated the Horner character and cut the play from five acts to two in an attempt to make it "inoffensively humorous".[20] A more successful adaptation was made the following year by David Garrick. He retained the five-act structure, but renamed the characters and called it The Country Girl. Peggy (the renamed Margery) is a virginal country girl who wants to marry against the wishes of her guardian, Jack Moody (the reimagining of Pinchwife).[20] In this cleaned-up form, The Country Wife continued a shadowy existence into the twentieth century, as Garrick's version was very popular, going through at least twenty editions and reaching the New York stage in 1794. The few modern critics who have read Garrick's version typically dismiss it as "sentimental and boring, where The Country Wife is astringent and provocative".[1]
Other adaptations
She Shall Have Music, a 1959 musical comedy, mixed The Country Wife with other Restoration comedies such as The School for Scandal and Love for Love. It debuted Off-Broadway on 22 January 1959.[21]
In 1977, the BBC's Play of the Month broadcast a production of The Country Wife with Anthony Andrews as Horner, Helen Mirren as Margery and Bernard Cribbins as Pinchwife; it was later released on DVD.[22]
The 1975 film Shampoo, with Warren Beatty as the Horner character, is a somewhat distant version of The Country Wife after exactly 300 years, reportedly inspired by the Chichester Festival production of 1969.[23]
In 1992, The Country Wife was adapted into a musical called Lust. Written by the Heather Brothers, it was first performed at the Queens Theatre in Hornchurch in the London Borough of Havering in 1992. It later transferred to the Theatre Royal Haymarket in London's West End, starring Denis Lawson as Horner. Lawson travelled with the production to New York for an Off-Broadway run at the John Houseman Theatre in 1995.[24]
On 13 April 2008, an adaptation was broadcast on BBC Radio 3, directed by David Blount and featuring Ben Miller as Horner, Geoffrey Whitehead as Pinchwife, Clare Corbett as Mrs. Margery Pinchwife, Nigel Anthony as Sir Jasper Fidget, Celia Imrie as Lady Fidget and Jonathan Keeble as Harcourt.[25]
