Bath’s annual summer love affair with Noël Coward is based largely, I suspect, on the fact that his plays are easy on the ear and eye, and offer ample opportunity for designs that engender a Homes and Gardens-style envy in the audience. The Theatre Royal’s new Coward revival is this thinly disguised autobiographical comedy about a self-centred matinee idol, Garry Essendine.
It’s a piece that the playwright himself protested was “a very light comedy written with the sensible object of providing me with a bravura part”. In fact, for all its many witticisms and sparkling bons mots, it really is a deeply unpleasant play in which superficially charming and ageing Essendine is continually protected from himself and external threats by an adoring coterie including his secretary Monica (Phyllis Logan), ex-wife Liz (Rebecca Johnson) and producers (Toby Longworth and Jason Morell) who demonstrate a determined ruthlessness because they know that it will maintain their position as a theatrical elite.
The trick for the actor playing Essendine is to make us like him and hate ourselves for doing so. Samuel West certainly has the knack, and what makes this a very fine performance in a high sheen but less than fine play is the way he layers the charm in such a way that you also see the hollow man beneath. Despite his promiscuity, Essendine is a man who doesn’t actually like sex, clearly doesn’t really like women, is terrified of intimacy (his lovers get banished to the spare bedroom) and loves himself too much. West successfully hints that Essendine’s future alone with “an apple and a good book” may not be the peaceful heaven he believes, but desolate and lonely because hell is not other people, it is facing yourself.
There is a strong farcical element, making much use of the spare bedroom, in a tottering plot that sees Essendine preparing for an African tour while simultaneously fending off the advances of a lovesick debutante Daphne (Daisy Boulton), an angry young male playwright (Patrick Walshe McBride) and his producer’s wife, Joanna (Zoe Boyle), who in a startlingly misogynistic portrait is painted as a predatory femme fatale. She’s the only character to get the measure of Garry and demonstrate at least a tiny level of self-knowledge and admit her self-interest.
The opening scenes have some appeal largely because of the stream of bons mots, but the
smug or hysterical self-regard of the characters soon renders them increasingly tedious company. Stephen Unwin’s production has plenty of gloss, but I wish he had grasped the nettle and exposed the play for what it is rather than trying to disguise its misogyny and snobbishness. The butler and maid are stock Coward lower classes whose only function is comic.
It’s West who lends this evening interest, although Downton’s Phyllis Logan also offers a wryly understated performance as the sexless Monica, more nanny than secretary. The audience lapped it up; I longed to spit it out.
• At the Theatre Royal, Bath, until 9 July. Box office: 01225 448844.
