The title change wrought upon this 1700 play is indicative not of self-conscious zhoozhing-up, but rather that its original title The Beau Defeated implies misleadingly that the focus of the story is a man. Not only do matters centre primarily on Mrs Rich – a banker’s widow hunting a titled second husband to secure her the place in high society for which she’s trying far too hard – but each of the several love-and-marriage plot strands typical of Restoration comedy is portrayed principally from the female point of view. The play contains more female characters than male... oh, and was written by a woman, the now largely and unjustly forgotten Mary Pix.

It’s instructive in unexpected ways, too. I began by feeling that, although director Jo Davies has her cast play even the comedy with seriousness and commitment (as you need to, to make it work: the audience must feel that the stakes are sufficiently high), it was missing just a notch or two of intensity. Eventually I realised that what I was expecting was a particularly male kind of rumbustiousness. Having identified and dismissed that cavil, it proved much easier to appreciate both play and production for what they are. Sophie Stanton as Mrs Rich plays the audience with a similar mastery and quirkiness to Grant Olding’s harpsichord-and-saxophone-quartet score; Olding has also penned a clutch of cabaret-style “soliloquy” numbers for Stanton/Rich, with sometimes self-parodically anachronistic lyrics (“Break out the Bolly/For a woman of quali-/-ty”).

Tam Williams portrays the once-titular beau as just the right amount less charismatic than he thinks, Daisy Badger propels the “intelligent, conscientious woman” component of the plot sympathetically, Sandy Foster gets a fencing sequence with Stanton that degenerates into a catfight (ah, there’s rumbustious), and Amanda Hadingue as another crass man’s huntswoman-in-chief vents some piercing halloos and is in charge of a couple of beautiful wolfhounds. There’s a risk of inadvertently describing the production as if the female predominance were an ideological end in itself and matters had to be viewed in that perspective. The reality is that this is an interesting and significant rediscovery given a thoughtful, lively and above all fun staging.

Written for the Financial Times.