"For my part, I always take that occasion to blow my nose," declares one of the young women, to which the other counters, "You must blow your nose half off then at some plays..."No need for any strategic hanky work at Girls' Night Out. Although dire in most artistic respects, it is a refreshing demonstration of how women have turned the spirit of lewd-mindedness and erotic voyeurism inside out (injected with the boisterous humour so often missing when the genders are reversed, male strip shows degrade neither the viewer nor the performers) and re-established them on terms that are not a mere sordid aping of the traditional privileges of men.Damned if they laugh and damned if they don't, Vanbrugh's Restoration women are in a no-win situation. Their protocol problem at the theatre is but one shrewdly and empathetically selected instance of a world where, the dramatist makes plain, room for female manoeuvre is tight.With divorce a rare, difficult and expensive business, obtained only via a private bill in Parliament, and with legal separation biased to the male and allowing neither party to re-wed, marriage for a woman could, as for the play's title character, be a life sentence as the despised property of a promiscuous syphilitic sot whose idea of loyalty is to brag to his friends: "I never drank my wife's health in my life, but I puked in the glass."Still almost exclusively associated in the popular mind with flattering fans, screeching fops, pouting bosoms and folk crying "La!" and "Stap me vitals!", Restoration comedy at its sharpest, can offer as merciless a dissection of marital hell as a Strindberg or an Albee.Just open at the National Theatre is Edward Ravenscroft's London Cuckolds, an enormously successful comedy back in 1681, adapted now and directed by the playwright Terry Johnson.Johnson's own hit comedy, Dead Funny, ripped the lid off a putrefying marriage, with Zoe Wanamaker's blistering Eleanor, unquietly going out of her mind in her desperation to have a baby, pitted against her husband and his circle of sad anoraks called The Dead Funny Society, which meets regularly to perform trainspotter-style re-enactments of the routines of their favourite deceased comics. Eleanor uses her scathing wit to confront problems: the second-hand schoolboy jokes and innocent music- hall smut which her spouse and his male chums assiduously parrot is their means of indefinitely postponing having to look at the pain under their noses.Talking to Johnson, I wondered aloud whether Eleanor, withering about the English male's sense of humour, would be willing to crack a smile at London Cuckolds. He beats me to the observation that, in terms of plotting and the sophistication of its sexual politics, Ravenscroft's play is more Ray Cooney than Alan Ayckbourn.In Vanbrugh's The Provoked Wife, the title character, who only marries for money, argues that you cannot reasonably blame men for judging women by their own unlovely lights: "We are as wicked... but our vice lies another way [backbiting, cheating at cards, telling lies, etc].

Men have more courage than we, so they commit more bold, impudent sins." Indeed, the play shows how a combination of social circumstance and something coyly nervous in her own nature whisks this woman from the brink of attractive adultery and back into the loveless bargain of her marriage.London Cuckolds, by contrast, exemplifies an earlier vogue in the theatre for plays where the female sex strikes back. The new National production stars Caroline Quentin of Men Behaving Badly fame. Women Behaving Badly would be an ideal sub-title for London Cuckolds. Johnson points out a feature of the period that had never hit him till he started work on this piece.

For a respectable woman, sex before marriage was virtually inconceivable: she needed to be married, paradoxically, before she could sew her wild oats.The middle-class aldermanic husbands in London Cuckolds certainly constitute no great temptation to remain on the straight and narrow. One, in the manner of the control-freak anti-hero of Moliere's School For Wives, has reared his prospective spouse from the age of four in close rural seclusion, like some prize pig of compliant naivety, failing to see that while you can keep a girl ignorant, you cannot necessarily keep her stupid.The men have knotty debates on which kind of woman is most likely to outwit her partner: "A wife that has wit will outwit her husband, and she that has no wit will be outwitted by those who wish to outwit him."The women, meanwhile, just get on with the outwitting. Enjoined by her departing husband to reply in the negative to any impertinent male interest while he is away, Caroline Quentin's character twists this to her advantage, keeping to the letter of the instruction, but so arranging a conversation with a desirable young gentleman that it becomes a formidable case of an occasion when "No" really does mean yes.London Cuckolds is broad, morally pretty untroubled and, within its own terms, very amusing. You could imagine the Eleanor of Dead Funny jibbing slightly, though, at the notion that the best a woman can do is sink to a man's standards and beat him at his own game.Indeed, as Max Stafford-Clark's excellent RSC production of Thomas Southerne's searching proto-feminist 1691 play The Wives' Excuse recently demonstrated, there was a backlash in the more sober following decade, when the implication that women were somehow programmed to retaliate with adultery, progressing like wind-up toys into another man's bed, came to be questioned.Everyone assumes that the heroine of this play will avenge her vicious philandering ninny of a husband in kind.