The Libertine - Brossura

The storytelling is confident and compelling... full of the smells of sex and the odour of disgust; the thrust of the dialogues burns with a lusty vigour and then collapses into the damp sheets of morning-after regret... A wonderful play about theatre, about excess and about the despair which stems from the meaninglessness of life. A really entertaining West End play that both dazzles and amuses. It's perfect, it's profound, and it's fun too. --Arts Desk

A restoration comedy written out of time... though there is much falling about, lusting and lunging, The Libertine also gives centre stage to the language, as rich as fruit cake, sumptuous, silly, rude, poetic... For all its swashbuckling, it is also about love, the theatre, the nature of kings and what happens to men who won't take themselves seriously. --The Times

A key point of Jeffreys' intriguing play is the gulf between art and life. The libertine explodes the myth of the debonair Restoration rakehell, but also captures the inquiring intelligence of the real Rochester... a complex figure who writes like an angel, lives like a devil and who, for all his deathbed repentance, seems as doomed as Mozart's Don Giovanni... An invigorating, warts-and-all portrait of a self-destructive sceptic. --Guardian

Exuberent...a world of excess... of personality, of appetites, of sexuality... Sex sells... but if there are ribald, rambunctious pleasures to be had from easy laughs, the play also pursues a darker line of enquiry about the ambivalence of destructive behaviour and the true cost of it. --The Stage

Stephen Jeffreys is a playwright whose work has been produced by the Royal Court, Paines Plough and Out of Joint, amongst others. He also wrote the screenplay for the 2004 feature film adaptation of his play The Libertine, starring Johnny Depp and John Malkovich.