The puritan lurking within The Libertine
The talented cast of The Libertine.When it first swaggers on stage, Stephen Jeffreys' The Libertine seems truly seductive - rather like its eponymous hero, John Wilmot (the 2nd Earl of Rochester), a notorious Restoration rake. Indeed, Jeffreys' dialogue alone amounts to an astounding feat of ventriloquy: his oratory seems to echo directly from the underbelly of the seventeenth century, and the playwright o…