Those who love the language of Oscar Wilde and Noel Coward will be thrilled with William Congreve’s 1700 comic masterpiece, The Way of the World,  a baroque gem in the crown of English theatre. It is the greatest Comedy of Manners.

And the subject matter of this most lustrous and elegant language? Treachery, trickery, lust for control and fortune, revenge, adultery, jealousy – yet ultimately love, acceptance and justice.

Its characters are the idle and titled rich, recently freed from the strictures of Puritanism,  charged by creative exuberance in a new world in which prodigality is the manifestation of generosity. And it’s especially a new world for women.

Mirabell, the play’s hero, wants to marry Millamant, but her aunt, Lady Wishfort, opposes the match … and so, at the gambling table, does the intricate scheming begin.

Garrick Theatre is graced by the generosity of renowned and venerable director Raymond Omodei who, in his first venture at Garrick, returns for his fourth time, to the quintessence of Restoration comedy, The Way of the World.