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Blue-pencilled into nine decades of obscurity by the Lord Chamberlain, who found its careless adultery beyond the pale, Noël Coward’s comedy of sexual morality finally makes its UK premiere in a production well-equipped to draw out its acute eye and deceptively deep characterisations.
The first of three acts spends altogether too long establishing altogether too many characters, but the second and third shave cast and concerns down to palpable, façade-slitting edges. Dorothea Myer-Bennett plays Carol, the flirtatious female in a triangle of 1920s poshos – caught between a cock and an artist in the form of military walrus Evelyn (Robert Portal) and Edward, her self-torturing society-painter husband (Jamie De Courcey).
Carol’s string of affairs puts Evelyn’s starched, macho puffery through the wringer, and reveals an unappetising streak of faux-martyrdom in Edward, but Coward is careful to keep everything ambiguous, to keep the hooks barbed and let no-one off them. It slips by all too quickly and trips away with a smirk when it should stick the knife in, but there’s substance and an intellectual honesty here that’s too often missing from Coward’s later plays.
Portal steals the stage in Belinda Lang’s intelligent if stately production, and Simon Kenny’s design necessitates just one farcical scene change. There is a sense that this is a neglected work that’s been well cared for, and, what’s more vital, understood for its considerable insight and humanity.