The hidden laughter of children suddenly gurgles from nowhere at the end of Sarah Frankcom's revival of Noël Coward's 1941 comedy. Minutes later, the Royal Exchange's in-the-round auditorium comes gloriously into its own as mayhem explodes in a climax that has all the energetic wildness of a malicious Halloween prank.
If Giles Croft's recent Nottingham Playhouse revival highlighted the Condomines' unpleasantness – smug, snug, middle class, and unaware of the coming storm of the second world war that will sweep their way of life aside – then Frankcom's is about the need to release, or be in touch with, your inner child. The marriage of writer Charles Condomine to his second wife, Ruth, is childless, sensible and devoid of passion, and its foundations are rocked by the arrival of the medium Madame Arcati and the materialisation of Charles's dead first wife, Elvira.
In a play in which "childish" is hurled as an insult, and the Condomines are old before their time, embalmed by convention and their sterile marriage, perhaps Coward is suggesting that real happiness requires both maturity and an ability to retain the high spirits of childhood. Or perhaps it's just a high-spirited romp – one well-served by Liz Ashcroft's art deco design in a production that has yet to find its comic rhythm, but surely will.
Annette Badland's skipping Madame Arcati hints of a woman so in thrall to her inner child that she's never really grown up. Suranne Jones's Ruth raises the spectre of a vanished pre-war world with every vowel, and as the unimaginative Charles, Milo Twomey plays a man who thinks he's making a lucky escape but is colluding in his own tragedy.
