If Ibsen sauce is good for the goose...

October 19, 2009 2:16 PM

Molière's Don Juan, Alan Ayckbourn's Norman Dewars, Shaw's Leonard Charteris. I am clearly missing some greats, but who are theatre's other great philandering characters, male or female? (Theatre only, please, no films or television.)
posted by mykescipark to media & arts (9 comments total)

Shakespeare's Falstaff?
posted by Nick Verstayne at 2:18 PM on October 19

Dr. Frank N. Furter appeared in The Rocky Horror Show as a stage musical before it was a movie. He boinks three characters during the show, and it's implied he's nailed all of the other characters at various points in the past. And then there's an orgy.
posted by Cool Papa Bell at 2:21 PM on October 19

Don Giovanni.
posted by spamguy at 2:29 PM on October 19

Carmen
posted by canoehead at 3:02 PM on October 19

Don Giovanni = Don Juan, and Molière got him from Tirso de Molina.

Captain Macheath in The Beggar's Opera by John Gay is a dashing highwayman who declares: "I love the Sex. And a Man who loves Money, might as well be contented with one Guinea, as I with one Woman." Intro and full text here. When Brecht adapted the piece into his Threepenny Opera, Macheath became Mackie Messer, or in English, Mack the Knife. Brecht kept his philandering as a major part of the plot.

Willmore, drunken anti-hero of Aphra Behn's The Rover, was said to have been modelled on John Wilmot, Earl of Rochester. He spends the play wooing both the feisty teenage virgin Hellena and the celebrated courtesan Angellica Bianca. The play proved so popular Behn wrote a sequel; full text of both here.

Quite a lot of Restoration through mid-eighteenth-century comedies have the kind of characters you're looking for.
posted by Pallas Athena at 3:29 PM on October 19

Tom Sargeant, in David Hare's Skylight (originated by Michael Gambon).
posted by nicwolff at 4:01 PM on October 19

Harry Paget Flashman
posted by codswallop at 8:09 PM on October 19

Lothario! (The Fair Penitent, by Nicholas Rowe)
posted by stray at 8:10 PM on October 19

Fantastic suggestions all. Thanks!
posted by mykescipark at 11:29 PM on October 19