What keeps Coward's comedy alive after more than 60 years? Obviously its deft plotting, musical language and that eccentric medium, Madame Arcati. But, watching Thea Sharrock's fine revival for the Peter Hall Company, it struck me that part of the play's fascination lies in how much it reveals about Coward's private convictions.
Misogamy, more than spiritualism, drives the plot. Not only is the writer-hero, Charles Condomine, spooked by his ghostly first wife, Elvira, and dominated by his second, Ruth: marriage itself is seen as a series of ratty exchanges in which partners gnaw at past infidelities. But the play also suggests that happiness for a writer lies in shedding emotional commitments. As Charles, like so many Coward protagonists, finally tiptoes away from chaos, he embodies the author's dream of a life of work and travel unhampered by binding relationships.
Alongside the self-revelation, the play also offers a master class in the art of giving life to off-stage incidents and characters. You can understand the romantic Elvira's horror at honeymooning in Budleigh Salterton and, when Charles huffily protests that "a woman in Cynthia Cheviot's position would hardly wear false pearls", you instantly see her in your mind's eye. My only cavil about Aden Gillett's neurotically suave Charles is that he sometimes puts emotion before diction so that you lose the full richness of his past relationship with the vividly polysyllabic Mrs Winthrop-Llewellyn.
Appropriately, given the play's theme, it is the women who dominate Sharrock's production. Amanda Drew is a sublime Elvira, shimmering into the room in a pink negligee and exuding a mischievous, feline sexiness. Joanna Riding endows Ruth with just the right crisply laundered fury. And, even if I've seen dottier Madame Arcatis than Penelope Keith, she catches exactly the medium's mix of dedication and vanity: she bridles at the word "amateur" and, passing a mirror, instinctively checks her maroon turban to make sure she's on song for a seance.
Written in wartime, the play questions the finality of death. If we still enjoy it today, that is partly because of its boisterous theatricality - here symbolised by the climactic disintegration of Simon Higlett's set. But it is also, I suspect, because the play confirms that under Coward's sophisticated mask lay a Peter Pan terrified of maturity and yearning for spiritual freedom.
· Until September 4. Box office: 01225 448844.
