Ferenc Molnar's The Guardsman, a Budapest boulevard comedy written in 1911, now has the feeling of an extended anecdote. Dealing with the eroticism of disguise within marriage, it takes two-and-a-half hours to make its point. The problem is that Pinter's The Lover tackles the same theme, with far greater emotional complexity, in the space of 50 minutes.
To be fair, Molnar gives his story a faint piquancy by making his protagonists warring actors. After six months of marriage, the narcissistic Nandor feels the bloom has gone off his relationship with the intriguing Ilona. So, pretending to head off to the provinces, he returns in the guise of a dashing guardsman to seduce his wife. The more he looks like succeeding, the more he is driven into frenzied jealousy of his invented alter ego.
Audiences today are quick on the uptake: we guess the outcome a good hour before it arrives. Molnar was also, I suspect, trapped by the conventions of his time: were the disguised hero actually to sleep with his wife, as well as stretching probability it would lead to searing, morning-after recriminations. In the end, however, Molnar keeps everything on the level of a charade by ensuring that Nandor enjoys little more than stolen kisses and the prospect of an adulterous assignation; contrast Pinter, where consensual sex drives the husband into a nervous breakdown.
Played with the lightest of touches, the play survives precariously. But, although Frank Marcus's translation possesses strokes of wit, Janet Suzman's production has a romping heaviness. For a start Charles Cusick Smith's set, however archaeologically accurate in its reproduction of the geometric designs of the Wiener Werkstatt movement, is ludicrously cluttered: for once, you see the point of Coward's injunction not to bump into the furniture.
While Greta Scacchi is sinuously decorative and studiously posy as Ilona, she lacks the starry incandescence Maggie Smith and Diana Rigg brought to the role. The whole joke of the play is that Ilona is a greasepaint creature who has rather reluctantly, like Congreve's Millamant, dwindled into a wife. Michael Pennington is much funnier as Nandor, donning a wonderfully fake Viennese accent to go with his plumes and epaulettes and fuming with Othello-like rage.
But the two leads seem to come from different generations and, although there is decent support from Nickolas Grace as a suave critic and Georgina Hale as Ilona's lower-class protector, you miss Molnar's teasing ambivalence. You go into the theatre expecting chilled Tokay and end up with warm cider.
Until November 25. Box office: 020-7369 1740.
