Park Theatre

Prodigy that he was, Noël Coward actually wrote The Rat Trap when he was 18, although it wouldn’t be performed until precisely one century ago, when he’d reached the ripe age of 26. It is, naturally, a comedy, concerning promising novelist Sheila and Keld, an aspiring playwright. They’re a couple, but Sheila’s flatmate Olive warns her not to marry him, reasoning it’ll be the death of her writing career and that they’ll fight ‘like rats in a trap’. Sheil ignores Olive… and Olive turns out to be entirely right. It gets a rare staging for its centary, in a version that’s been ‘reimagined’ by Bill Rosenfield and produced by Troupe, who had a big hit at the Park with their take on The Forsyte Saga. Kirsty Patrick Ward directs

This review is from the 2025 Edinburgh Festival Fringe I think we can all agree at that this stage in human history, no genre – or subgenre, whatever – has been more comprehensively done to death than the dinner party reunion play. I say this not to criticise Northern Irish playwright Karis Kelly for having the temerity to write a drama in which four female generations of the Gillespie familiy gather for the occasion of Eileen’s ninetieth birthday and drinks are taken, secrets are revealed etcetera etcetera. But I do wonder if some of the wackier decisions at the end come from a well-meaning but ill-advised desire to break the mould. In fact for much of its length Katie Posner’s production for Paines Plough makes for a perfectly decent play, even if it does have a familiar rhythm. Julia Dearden is great fun as the sweary, outspokenly Unionist Eileen; Andrea Irvine, Caoimhe Farren and Muireann Ni Fhaogáin are all solid as, respectively, Eileen’s mumsy but on edge daughter Gilly, strident granddaughter Jenny and sensitive English great granddaughter Muireann. Everything putters on nicely, with Dearden’s caustic comic performance keeping things lively as we edge towards revelations about the whereabouts of Gilly and Jenny’s absent husbands. And then Consumed goes totally nuts, with a trio of mountingly bombastic twists fired off in bewilderingly rapid succession. The whereabouts of Jenny’s husband turns out to be fairly pedestrian. Gilly’s is wild. And a further revelation...