LADIES WHO LURCH
The Lord Chamberlain took a bit of handling to let this play’s louche presumptions of extramarital liaisons be flaunted onstage: and one public morality campaigner shouted from the box at its premiere when he did let its suggestion of female sex-before-marriage creep pas them . It shows us two wives of ten settled years’ standing, their dull safe amiable husbands off playing golf in Chichester, being stirred to romantic panic by the impending visit of a Frenchman – Maurice! – who had flings with each of them before their marriages. Fred and Bill once briskly dispatched to the golf, the women spend the day and evening agonizing over whether to run away from temptation, or confront their old lover with virtuous assurances that they love their husbands even though the grand passion has settled to “happiness and tranquillity devoid of all violent emotions outside golf”
As memory unrolls and faint half-acknowledged rivalries surface – there’s Pisa, Venice, and a deeply regretted row over a salami sandwich – they move between maudlin and yearning nervousness, and at one stage Coward gives us a tour de force of pas-devant the servants non-sequiturs while the maid (we’ll come to her, oh yes) serves a four course dinner at which they plan to be elegantly surprised by the man’s arrival: a performative “sistahs before mistahs” assurance to him that they’re well over him, oh yes. .This bonding, quarreling, and reckless drinking lasts through the bravura first half – Janie Dee and Alexandra Gilbreath well up to it – with not a man in sight. Then in the brief second half all three baffled or artful males are on stage to hear a number of truths, accusations and lies, and each more or less say their piece.
Grand holiday fare for stressed couples, it comes in under two hours with interval, a squib which isn’t, admittedly, one of Noel Coward’s greatest or most-revived plays (though the two Hermiones did it in 1949…!) It is, on the other hand, rich in his trademark scenes in which overwrought people in 1930s polite-society get furiously impolite to each other over classy silverware and crystal and- as a bonus – are effortlessly outclassed by their servants. The maid Saunders – Sarah Twomey – at first seems a bit wooden but then shows how much of it is a deliberate front: she has worked in grander places than this, knows more about golf than the master plays the piano far better than the mistress, and delivers a lovely balletic interlude while tidying-up, courtesy of her time “With the Ballet Russe”. Twomey also deploys a most pleasing talent for a straight face, not easy round the rising chaos of alcohol, anxiety and rising animosity once Galbreath kicks her shoes off…
It’s a squib all right, but in Christopher Luscombe’s fine production it has Janie Dee, and Dee never fails to enhance one’s evening. She is Julia, the more self-contained and intelligent of the pair, and deploys in her face every level of Confident hauteur, bafflement, desire for an even keel through life alongside an instinct to capsize it. Gilbreath’s Jane is a perfect foil, more immediately emotional about the possibility of Maurice re-entering their lives with his moustache and big eyes and shining teeth and the way he kissed your hand while looking up adoringly.
The comedy of the picture of they paint of this superb cicisbeo is enhanced by our earlier glimpse of both balding husbands in fairisle jumpers, long socks and golfing knickers. When they reappear for the conclusiom, Christopher Hollis and Richard Teverson nobly mask any natural erotic fascination they own in magnificent layers of unerotic husbandliness, rising only briefly to outrage about how wives should be repentant. And to the agreement, when he finally and fleetingly appears, that Duclos seems a good chap. He is Graham Vick, worth it for the accent and moustache alone .
menierchocolatefactory.com to 21 feb
rating 4
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