Laugh, and the world laughs with you. Cry, and you cry alone. Or so a certain proverb has been telling us for some time, even if the theater, at least, often tends to reverse the proposition. The stage exults in the sort of shared catharsis allowed by the more poignant and emotive corner of the repertoire; I can count many a Chekhov, Shakespeare, or Eugene O'Neill production that has left an audience collectively misty-eyed. Comedy, however, can be something else. Misfire in your attempts to be funny, and you risk the odd, lonely snort from an audience that wants to be there in spirit but can only do so much when the promise of chuckles quickly goes cold.  As it happens, I saw this phenomenon played out to differing degrees twice in recent weeks, both at London stagings of little-known plays from the Restoration, the theatrical period that often has to push contemporary audiences hard to get them to join in the wished-for romp. In political terms, the Restoration refers to the ascent to the throne in 1660 of Charles II, which itself marked the return of the monarchy after as sustained a flirtation with republicanism as Britain has known. On stage, meanwhile, these were heady, bosom-heaving times, rife with plays that put sexual double-dealing front and center, the couplings liberally accompanied by rouged faces, heavy wigs, and your inevitably self-regarding, sexless fop.  How do you deliver up these texts as plays for today? That's easy, if you're running the National Theatre and have decided yourself to direct George Etherege's 1676 play "The Man of Mode." Nicholas Hytner's approach to this tale of the swaggering Dorimant and the various women in his midst has been to set the play in the present day, amid a milieu of bare chests, swanky wine bars, and anxious Asian families, lending the play a multiculturalism to go with an erotic piquancy that, Hytner suggests, belongs equally to our time. That's fine, assuming the comedy still carries a sting to go with language that can be as baroque and encrusted as some of the more outré costumes that accompany more traditional stagings of this play.  It's on that front that Hytner's large- scale production proves fairly heavy going - until, that is, a fast-ascending young actor named Rory Kinnear comes prancing into view as Sir Fopling Flutter, the "man of mode" of the title, and suddenly, an uncertain evening seems on surer ground. It's not just that Kinnear grabs by the throat a text that too many of his colleagues seem either to handle by shouting or overkill (Nancy Carroll as the amorously fraught Mrs. Loveit) or with a Brando- esque machismo (Tom Hardy in the central role of the libidinous Dorimant) that seems to belong to another play, and era, altogether. Chattering in French, his shoes glistening to match his verbal polish, Kinnear accomplishes the difficult task of seeming to be preening and self-deprecating at once. Within minutes, he has the audience cheering his every exit and even some of his entrances, as befits this "Man of Mode's" man of the hour: the occasional lone chuckle of the opening passages without him soon given over to general mirth.  Alas, there's scant revelry on view in the competing Restoration entry of recent weeks: David Lan's brave if misguided Young Vic staging of "The Soldiers' Fortune," a lesser-known play by Thomas Otway involving much the same lineup of rakehells and ingénues led this way and that by impulses that have surely not shown their age. Tipping the nod in places to Shakespeare's "Much Ado About Nothing," Otway's 1681 play exists at the opposite end of the spectrum from the same writer's best-known tragedy, "Venice Preserv'd," which has itself met with mixed success in my experience of it on the London stage.  But as unfurled across a multilevel set that sacrifices from the start any hope of intimacy (or even, given its confusing layout, common sense), "Soldiers' Fortune" all but squanders the good will generated by a distinguished cast, among whom Anne-Marie Duff, Oliver Ford Davies and David Bamber will all surely continue on, and soon, to better things. (Bamber, too, might want to rethink the anachronistic 1960s pop-star haircut.) The story tells of two soldiers returned to London and the women in their midst, chiefly Duff's Lady Dunce, wife to Ford Davies's snarling, aging if also moneyed Sir Davy Dunce; so given is he to ghostly visions and apoplectic snarling fits that one's not entirely sure whether to believe his pronouncement that "I will be back before I die."  Those are strong words from a stillborn evening where such prospects for humor as exist all but curdle across three long hours. In an ideal world, one shouldn't be clocking the discrepancy between a character's name - Sir Jolly Jumble, the lecher played by a lip- smacking Bamber - and the lack of laughs, a void to which a hard-working cast responds by raising their voices. In vain. (The production ends March 31.)
Three comedies in London reflect the continuing challenges of their genre: George Etherege’s “The Man of Mode,” Thomas Otway’s “The Soldiers’ Fortune” and “Boeing-Boeing” by Marc Camoletti.