A 1920’s BIRD OF PARADISE IN THE HENCOOP
Trust Trevor Nunn to make this a bit of an event: a rarely-seen Noel Coward play set with ferocious accuracy and style in its birth-year 1925. Unapologetic curtain-drops between each of the four scenes; no fewer than three sets of French windows opening on lawns and a distant folly beyond; young people storming in and out in tennis-whites, sometimes with actual rackets, cricket sweaters, trousers held up with a regimental tie. A cast of 14 plus 8 supernumaries for the final party scene, a sofa for elegant reclining, and snatches of the great man himself singing “Poor Little Rich Girl” or “Stately homes of England” between scenes. There’s a whiff of theme-park here, and even before the ladies get into eveningwear, Simon Higlett’s costume designs are more than easy on the eye.
Yet the real interest of the play – it’s not vintage Coward, and a good half-hour too long – is (as in THE RAT TRAP I reviewed the other week) the fascination of thinking about Coward when he was young. He was 18 writing the Rat Trap, 24 for The Vortex, 25 for this. And in all of them he eschews creating his trademark sacred-monsters like Gary Essendine and Judith Bliss, epigramming defensively at one another. Instead he builds naturalistic characters and uses them to become properly angry about conventional morality and its stiff unforgiving bitterness.
Michael Praed and Greta Scacchi are the affluent country -dwelling Whittakers, their daughters the primly hearty Marion (Imogen Elliott) and romping schoolgirlish Hilda (Grace Hogg-Robinson, a bravura scamperer). Suddenly their son John, who has been abroad, arrives home with his new wife, of whom Mrs Whittaker is more than nervous: Scacchi at her comic best in crimped steel-grey hair and manproof tweeds . For this new bride Larita is, she mourns, rumoured to be “the sort of women who infest French watering-places”, a divorcee seven years older than John.
She is all they fear and we long for: Alice Orr-Ewing towering over all the Whittakers (including boyish John (Joseph Potter) in both height and drop-dead chic and a clear, amused open intelligence. The blonde and worldly sophisticate is a bird of paradise in this nervous hencoop. Three months elapse between the first two scenes, so by the second Larita is lollingnbored and depressed on the sofa, reading Proust’s Sodom and Gomorrah and refusing to go and watch the hearty bores play tennis. Marian pops by to have one of her “straight talks” as a “pal” about how this new sister in law should not “encourage” their father in loose talk. Colonel /Whittaker has been, we gather, a bit of a dog in his time: in a a lovely brief interlude he sidles in and plays wild bezique with Larita. At another point Charles – a local friend of John’s former fiancee Sarah – discovers that they have European casino acquaaintances in common, and Larita comes to life and laughs with him. A better relationship is with Sarah herself, who is brighter than the Whittaker girls and who rapidly – and to her dismay – discovers that the infantile John is fed up with living up to his wife and sort of wants her back. Lisa Ambalavanar conveys very nicely how Larita’s shine has made Sarah see there is more to life and ideas than tennis.
There is comedy, plenty of it, but the author is also wielding an almost unnerving sincerity. A confrontation over a newspaper article reveals more of Larita’s past and her response becomes magnificently , though melodramatically, sincere ( meanwhile of course Scacchi is beautifully funny in outrage). The point is that the incomer argues her case: why shouldn’t she love the puppyish John, why shouldn’t she move on from her past to a different life, even if its a bit boring? What kind of hypocritical moralism should stop her? Surely not the paradoxical “easy virtue” of the title, the sort Marian and her mother preach?
But a revealing conversation late on with Charles, and a decision, suggest a kind of despair in the playwright: a conclusion that actually , everyone had simply better stay in their lane. Watering-place people and respectable Whittakers are just different species, and love alone is not a reliable bridge. Which is fascinating, and makes you think about Coward’s times, and his life, anew. For that – and for the dazzle of the production and performances – I am grateful.
Artstheatre.co.uk. To 7 March
Rating 3.
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