If the Royal Shakespeare Company’s current production of Aphra Behn’s The Rover (reviewed recently) encapsulates the rollicking side of Restoration drama, Stephen Jeffreys’ 1994 play The Libertine captures the unacceptable side of the era by taking it to excess. The titular character, John Wilmot, 2nd Earl of Rochester, was a notorious rakehell as well as being a classically influenced, but principally obscene poet and playwright. He was repeatedly exiled from the court of Charles II for everything from abducting his future wife to vandalising a sundial, and died at the age of 33 from alcoholism and venereal disease.

It’s often said – not least by me – that a play will fail to engage us emotionally without at least one sufficiently sympathetic character. Jeffreys’ play, and Terry Johnson’s production, give the lie to that. Yes, we may experience moments of warmth for Rochester’s wife Elizabeth Malet (Alice Bailey Johnson) or his mistress, actress Elizabeth Barry (Ophelia Lovibond, currently playing the back half of Sky TV’s Hooten And The Lady)... but the former is too inclined at every opportunity to exalt her own martyrdom and the latter driven more by ambition than any tenderness. Jasper Britton’s Charles II is sardonic and periodically affable but refuses to concede an atom of power.

As for Rochester himself, his prologue to the audience (written, like the rest of the play, in an exuberant Restoration tone but with largely modern vocabulary and phrasing) announces in as many words, “You will not like me now and you will like me a good deal less as we go on.” Like many who are both gifted and aware of their gifts, he expects too much indulgence; his downfall is not matter of moralising, but simply of recognising that conduct has consequences. Dominic Cooper is excellent casting, combining as he does an attractive magnetism with the hint that at any moment it might all go explosively to hell.

Johnson and his cast relish the sheer filth of Rochester’s oeuvre, culminating early in Act Two with a rehearsal of the play Sodom (not historically proven as Rochester’s work) and a sweet musical ode from the ladies of the company to “Signor Dildo”, complete with props and gestures. You have been warned.

Written for the Financial Times.