It is strange seeing Coward's Semi-Monde in the same week as Wedekind's Lulu. Both view human beings as caged animals driven by sexual desire. The key difference is that Noël Coward's creatures camouflage their erotic itch under a savage politesse, and the author himself views them with a mixture of voyeuristic glee and puritanical disdain. But then Coward always carefully kept a foot in both camps.
Written in 1926 and unperformed until the Glasgow Citizens revived it in 1977, the play now gets its London premiere in another sumptuous Philip Prowse production. We are in the Paris Ritz lounge and bar, where we are offered a glittering kaleidoscope of dressy decadence. Rich women find ingenious ways to deceive their menfolk. An ageing novelist seduces a young bride while the dullish groom goes off with the writer's daughter. Meanwhile, a callow youth hovers between the sexes while elderly gays make witty remarks with feline intensity, and promiscuous lesbians quarrel with their partners. This is Grand Hotel seen through a glass darkly.
As a young dramatist, Coward has problems handling 28 characters in a seething social panorama. Everyone, of whatever gender, tends to speak with His Master's Voice. A waspish Sapphist describes an unfortunate prima donna as "the most constipated Carmen I've ever heard" while the hetero novelist dislikes Rapallo because "it's filled with double-breasted American matrons". Yet the play constantly intrigues because of Coward's equivocal attitude to this opulent menagerie. He was always a mixture of cosmopolitan sophisticate and Teddington maiden aunt, and here you feel he both admires the characters' verbal style and deplores their sexual intemperance. The giveaway comes when the novelist remarks of a group of epicene gigglers that "they're not even real of their kind", as if gay sex should always be closeted under good manners.
It's not a great play but it offers a revealing portrait of Coward's divided self. And Prowse's design and production make it a feast for the eye. Under an ornate golden cupola black-clad couples come and go while Derwent Watson picks out Coward standards mixed with Tristan and Isolde on the piano, and Nichola McAuliffe flashes her sensational legs and drily intones Parisian Pierrot.
Prowse's one mistake is to project the action forwards, in the final act, into the fascist 1930s, with swastika leaflets descending from the flies. Coward was offering a panorama of hedonism rather than a prophecy of Nazism.
The vast cast contains some memorable cameos. McAuliffe turns plausibly from chanteuse to errant nymph, John Carlisle is excellent as a dessicated novelist. There is good work from Benedick Bates as a wandering bisexual, and Frances Tomelty as an angry lesbian. You never get to know any of the characters very well, but this is Coward acting as the Daumier of 1920s decadence and, through his lightning cartoons, revealing more of his own moral confusion than he realised.
Booking until April 28. Box office: 020-7494 5045. A version of this review appeared in later editions of yesterday's paper.
