The Way of the World by William Congreve was presented in the Project Arts Centre for the Dublin Theatre Festival 1993.
Closer to Sheridan, Wilde or Coward than to his contemporaries, Congreve (1670-1729) is master of the Comedy of Manners and The Way of the World is his best play. It is also his most modern.
Congreve sidesteps the usual stock characters to give us complex, capricious, but entirely believable people who exercise their diamond-edged wit in a plot that would out-twist the most labyrinthine detective novel. It is a portrait of a sex-obsessed, money-grubbing, scandal-riddled world which in Rough Magic’s 1930 setting clearly and mercilessly holds up the mirror to our own.
