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'I am a woman -- a living, passionate, pulsating woman'. There are some lines you could only get away with in the 1920s, and this revival of a largely forgotten early Noël Coward play includes quite a few of them. It’s the story of Janet (Zoe Waites), the woman in question, who’s spurred into a kind of sexual liberation after being wrongly accused of adultery.
She and her best friend Peter crawl from the wreckage of a train crash in their jammies, only to find that everyone assumes they’ve been having a torrid affair - so naturally, they decide to prove them right. It’s a satire of an English society that closely policed sexual morality, and felt that people must be clad in multiple layers of tweed to muffle their illicit desires. But, more than that, it’s also quite a silly drawing room comedy, full of redoubtable mothers and jibes about hats. And it feels as though director Martin Parr’s interest in the proto-feminist themes that run through the play derails its momentum, without ever finding some real emotional depth.
He takes it all at a turgid pace, making Coward’s stream of quips about tea feel thick and sludgy. The uneven cast don’t seem to have fully decided on an approach to the increasingly ludicrous twists of the play: they switch from brittle lightness to stagey declaiming and hysterical rants. A strong production smoothes over some of the cracks: a stylish sound design from Pete Malkin and composer Catherine Jayes masks the scene changes with an ingenious crackle of 1920s song, and the judder of a distant train crash.
This wreckage is clearly a crashing great metaphor for the devastation of both Janet’s marriage and the nitpicky sexual morality of her friends and family. But its impact is laboured when applied to Coward’s muddled, flimsy plot: he can’t quite take its emotional casualities seriously, and nor can we.