In 1925 Noel Coward's Fallen Angels inspired the public to one of its periodic fits of morality. Bishops and self-appointed censors campaigned against it and the Daily described its twin heroines as "suburban sluts". Now it seems a harmless divertissement that survives largely as a vehicle for its performers.
What caused the furore? Clearly the fact that two married women, living a life of passionless boredom, whip themselves into a state of sexual excitement over the return of a former lover. In the play's celebrated central act they get riotously tipsy as they await the nocturnal arrival of the Gallic Romeo. But, having stoked up the sexual fires, Coward banks them down again in the overly symmetrical final act as each woman falsely believes the other has had a secret assignation with the Gallic intruder.
Coward makes some sharp points about male hypocrisy: in particular, the middle-class Englishman's belief that wild oats are things that only chaps may sow. But it's a one-joke play that teases out its central idea to the point of nervous exhaus tion. Coward clearly recognised the problem by beefing up the text in 1958 to give extra prominence to an all-purpose maid, a kind of beskirted Jeeves who exudes an alarming omniscience.
But it is the famous drunk scene that people come to see and, in Michael Rudman's production, it is given a frenzy by Felicity Kendal and Frances de la Tour. Kendal is all disintegrating demureness as she tumbles over sofas and strangles herself in telephone cords; de la Tour is more like an inebriated camel as she lopes unsteadily about the stage and peers mournfully at the bottom of empty glasses. Rudman's best innovation is to hint at a suppressed lesbianism as the two dance clingingly together and pass a cigarette from one mouth to another. But the scene would be funnier still if it were less full of expertly choreographed business.
Good as they are, the stars are overshadowed by Tilly Tremayne as the sharp-featured maid who knows about everything from golf to tropical medicine and caps her employers' every remark. Stephen Greif wittily plays the French lover as an ambulatory shrug and Eric Carte, angry in plus fours, wonderfully embodies husbandly outrage. The stars do their thing; but it is the supporting actors who, by never overstepping the modesty of nature, justify this revival of Coward's attenuated farce.
Until March 2001. Box office: 020-7494 5070.
