Jeremy Kingston's wittily ingenious play might once have found favour in the West End. Today it gets its premiere in a north London pub theatre, where it is briskly directed by Robert Gillespie and offers some tart, amusing comments on life, love, art and the problems of self-fulfilment.
Kingston seizes on the fact that Agatha Christie, Noël Coward and Dickie Mountbatten all severally holidayed at the same hotel in Devon. So he brings them together for a weekend and allows their varied visions of life to intersect. Christie, although temporarily in flight from her husband, believes squarely in marital fidelity. Coward feigns sexual insouciance but is racked when his latest lover threatens to leave him. And Mountbatten, enjoying a last fling with a naval chum, hovers uncertainly on the brink of marriage to Edwina.
Much of the play consists of camp chat conducted over cocktails and nuts; when Coward is in full spate, you get a heady mix of pastiche and pistachios. But Kingston raises serious issues, especially in a duel between Coward and Christie. "Let me come to your point," Coward tells Agatha; she is trying to say that Dickie - because of his fury over the ostracism of his Germanic father, his improbable marriage and his ideas about building a whodunnit around an unreliable narrator - combines all the ingredients of betrayal. Coward suavely suggests that we each have to make our own accommodation with the demands of love and life and, in the end, "dread nought".
I don't buy Kingston's criticism that the early work of Christie and Coward lacked, respectively, "credible emotion" and "passion". Coward, after all, went on to write The Vortex. But Kingston's play is full of sharp dialogues and perceptively suggests that our moral codes are based on our personal preferences. Robert Forknall excellently conveys Coward's love for machine-gun epigrams, while Caroline Wildi smoothly evokes the young Christie's ethical probity and Hywel John's bisexual Dickie is appropriately tricky.
· Until October 3. Box office: 020-7704 6665.
