Synopsis

Restoration is a forceful, darkly comic story of cruelty, injustice and iron privilege. Bond appropriates and parodies the conventions of Restoration theatre with barbed accuracy and style, underwriting his epigrams and double plots with a fierce discourse on class and inequality. The play is set in eighteenth-century England: the foppish and cold-blooded Lord Are is forced by poverty into an unwanted marriage with the daughter of a wealthy mineowner, and they proceed to duly detest one another. The second plot sees the guileless footman Bob Hedges bring home a new wife, Rose, who is the daughter of a freed slave. One morning, Lord Are commits a bizarre and fatal crime over his breakfast toast. He persuades the dazed Bob that it is in fact Bob who is responsible for the crime. But a battle ensues between the justice-hungry Rose and the fortified privilege of the ruling classes. Restoration was first presented in 1981 at the Royal Court Theatre, London.