SMOOTH AS VELVET, SHOT WITH GILT AND GUILT
Ahhh I do love a well-made play from the 1920s (remember The Deep Blue Sea , just lately!). This one too deals with adultery and hidden pain among the well-to-do, but Somerset Maugham offers a less wrenching take than Rattigan, going in more for dry wit, adult resignation, and an entertaining faux-cynicism overlying a surprising degree of humane tolerance. Laura Wade, fresh from adapting Jilly Cooper for the telly, has made a few artful twitches and timeshifts in Maugham’s 1926 play, but it retains the ‘well-made’ civility of making the characters’ relationships and the inciting incident crystal clear from the start.
Constance’s mother and her practical, less-chic sister Martha both know that our heroine’s husband John is sleeping with her best friend Marie-Louise. At one point there’s a circular conversation in which four of five in the elegant sitting- room know this damning fact, two of them with guilt, and believe that the betrayed wife doesn’t know a thing. Only of course she actually does. So on goes the dance , literally a couple of times as Tarmara Harvey’s lively production indicates the time-shifts – to the past moment of revelation and back – with low-lit moments and a Jamie Cullum jazz score. Characters move surreally in patterns and the set goes a bit poltergeist . Tthere’s a great wallpaper gag, don’t miss it.
It’s swooningly attractive to look at, and has filled the RSC shop with many a jazz age butterfly brooch and silken scarf . Every woman in the building, ushers included, seem to want Constance’s stage wardrobe, especially the gilt black velvet theatre-cloak in which she prepares to go off to the West End to see a play (called The Constant Wife, natch) with her old friend and suitor Bernard . He is Raj Bajaj, a masterclass in baffled innocence. Maugham’s wit is sharp too, though Wade has added a couple of sub-Jilly double-entendres he wouldn’t have liked much. But full advantage is taken of Constance’s Mum (Kate Burton) and her drily cynical views on things it is best a wife decides simply not to know.
Somerset Maugham, being bisexual, was one of the best male writers about female frustration, temptation and self-assertion, and Constance’s moment of shocked pain is as sharp as her realization of her fragile position – “What is a wife, among well-to-do people?” she asks, when the house is run so much by servants and she contributes little and might end up discarded in “two rooms over a flower shop”. She sees that her single sister with an interiors shop is right, and that “the only independence worth having is financial independence”.
So she joins the firm, advising less wise hausfraus on which hideous fringed lamp to buy, just as Waugham’s wife Syrie did. And meanwhile she works out the best approach to conserve what she wants of her marriage, in a brilliantly sly but likeable way. Endearingly, the only person to whom she fully confides her pain and bafflement is Bentley the butler (Mark Meadows, beautifully understated) who in return confides that the sick mother he keeps visiting is, in fact, a male lover. “Must be very difficut” she says kindly.
It flows merrily along, but an equal buzz on Wednesday made me glad to have missed the press night due holiday. Because an understudy show can be a thrill: Rose Leslie was off and her understudy, Jess Nesling, proved absolutely stunning: every expression, every move, every sad-resigned grownup emotion about the inevitable cooling of marital love given to perfection in the intimate Swan. Can’t take your eyes off her. The others are fun too, Amy Morgan a magnificent feminist Martha with one barnstorming speech after the interval, and though Luke Norris’ John was a bit too much of a cartoon lounge-lizard in the first half , he came good when near the end his comeuppance is complete.
A highly enjoyable evening. Expect an outbreak of extreme velvet evening-shrugs and hand-painted stoles this autumn.
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rsc.org.uk To 2 august
rating 4
theatreCat 