Who does the young Noel Coward remind me of? In a strange way, John Osborne. Both were iconoclasts nostalgic for a world they attacked, both were headline celebrities with a private belief in the work ethic. And for proof of Coward's internal contradictions, you have only to see his 1924 play, Easy Virtue, given a rare and largely successful revival by Maria Aitken at Chichester.
Coward begins by borrowing a standard Edwardian plot: the conflict between a shady lady with a past and the staid county set into which she has intemperately married. Larita, a louche divorcee, has met up with a callow cub, John Whittaker, in Cannes, and then finds herself at odds both with him and her upper middle-class in-laws. She likes to skulk indoors reading Proust while her husband bounces around on the tennis-court and her stoic flippancy collides with the family's social rigidity. Confronted by her supposedly scandalous past, Larita strikes a flamboyant blow for freedom at the Whittakers' wanly festive annual hop.
Clearly Coward sides with Larita's passion for life and art as against the family's snobbery and sexual repression. But, although it's not in the same league artistically, Coward's play reveals curious affinities with Look Back In Anger. Like Osborne, Coward casts subver sive ideas in a traditional form, creates a provocative protagonist who finds no responsive chord in the surrounding world and shows a sneaking regard for the Edwardian values he was attacking: significant that in both Easy Virtue and Look Back the most sympathetic character is a retired colonel who represents a vanished decency and grace.
Coward, at 23, certainly doesn't have Osborne's rancid eloquence; but both found themselves cast as spokesman for a disillusioned generation they didn't particularly like. A key difference is that Coward's protagonist is here female, which prompts a couple of cavils. Greta Scacchi admirably conveys Larita's transition from bright-eyed bride to bored domestic prisoner and gives her final glorious swansong the right touch of Gloria Swanson. But, since Larita represents the older woman, she looks too young for the part. I also fail to see why Aitken cuts a vivacious second-act climax in which Larita angrily smashes a statuette of the Venus de Milo.
In compensation, Aitken complements the action with domestic bustle and casts from strength: Michael Jayston and Wendy Craig as the groom's parents, respectively embody benign tolerance and constipated disapproval, Jenny Quayle, as Larita's religious sister-in-law, even manages to bound up stairs in huffy indignation and Lou Gish sexily lights up the scene as the hero's original intended. She, too, has a beau here played, in Aitken's most original touch, by a young black actor, Evroy Deer. It's a nice idea justified by the palpable frisson it produced in the Chichester audience, even if it makes the play an unexpected harbinger of Guess Who's Coming To Dinner, as well as of Osborne's neurotic classic.
