The Country Wife, Royal Exchange, Manchester, review Pshaw, I do confess it. I've got a country wife. She's pretty and lovely, clever not artful - a catch as many have told me. Often, especially when I head north to review the big regional openings, I have to leave this good creature to her own devices. At the moment, we've got a lot of workmen in doing odd-jobs. I know there's Downton Abbey and Parade's End to divert her, but should I be worried? What man in this position wouldn't be? We can laugh at the neurotic obsession about being "cuckolded" that powers William Wycherley's oak-solid classic (1675) but ask any husband whether he trusts other men to honour the sanctity of his marriage and in his darkest moments, he will concede an age-old fear. Antiquated references to horns aside, nicely referenced by a cluster of them overhanging the stage in this Royal Exchange revival, The Country Wife remains hugely watchable because it taps and mocks a primal insecurity. Horner, the licentious anti-hero, gets it put about that he's impotent, the better to relax the guard of London's men-folk. Pinchwife, the play's leading dolt, has bagged a country wench, simple-natured Margery, in the fond hope that he can keep this biddable soul from metropolitan temptation or, if need be, under lock and key. Horner's stratagem results in a queue of refined ladies hastening for his services. Pinchwife's master-plan, needless to say, has the obverse effect, propelling the comely baggage towards the forbidden fruit of Horner himself. You could argue that this Restoration romp has a relevant feminist kick to it. It's brazen about frustrated female desire; in a neat riposte to the boy-player days of yore, it also supplied the empowering sight of a woman disguised as a man; and it springs a few shaming threats of domestic violence, with Pinchwife's insanely jealous vow to "write whore with this penknife in your face" unless Margery sends Horner a letter of rejection. Beyond placing the bustling period action within Helen Goddard's symbolic birdcage design (with mixed results, some sightlines are partly obscured by its high-rising poles), director Polly Findlay doesn't push any modish strident message, though. Handling the plotty, knotty momentum of the thing well without losing clarity, she's content to show men behaving bawdily and stupidly - with some far-from-perfect women caught in the middle. Amy Morgan is just right as the corruptible country lass - with blonde ringlets, a singsong Welsh accent, and an ambiguous air of coquette and innocent. There's entertaining work elsewhere, particularly from a downbeat Nick Fletcher as her sternly Puritanical and ever-twitchy husband Pinchwife and Oliver Gomm as the preposterous fop Sparkish, the carefree flipside to the former's over-protective idiocy. Felix Scott as the wicked sex-god Horner is let down in the looks department by a scraggy wig and patchy make-up. Perhaps the production, like his insatiable character, needs a bit more time to bed in. Forgive me but I'm not going to hang around, though, to check that it does so. Until Oct 20.