To out or not to out? That is the question lurking behind Noël Coward's last play in which a famous writer is finally forced out of the closet. And, after a slowish first act, it makes for a gripping moral debate in a production which, since its King's Head debut earlier this year, has acquired the enlivening presence of Vanessa Redgrave.
Now played in its original full-length version, the play takes its time to get going. The first act is largely a cat-and-mouse game in which Carlotta, a vengeful actress, turns up at the luxury Swiss hotel suite of an ex-lover, Sir Hugo Latymer. He is impatient to know her game and so, frankly, are we. It transpires that she is not merely threatening to publish his love letters to her but is also proposing to offer evidence of his clandestine homosexuality to a biographer.
Is the hero Somerset Maugham, or Coward himself? In a sense that matters less than the issue really at stake: the contest between sexual privacy and emotional honesty. Coward, I think, slightly skews the debate by suggesting, against all the evidence, that his hero might have been a great writer if only he had come clean.
He is on much stronger ground in implying that Latymer, or indeed Maugham, might have been a better, more fulfilled man if he had not lived a constant lie. It is fascinating to be reminded in his final play that Coward, for all his reputation as a cosmopolitan hedonist, was really a puritan moralist.
But if Sheridan Morley's production has gained Ibsenite overtones, they come largely from Vanessa Redgrave as the capricious Carlotta. She plays the first act in a black mini-dress and with a note of fey skittishness. But in the second act we are reminded that Carlotta has played Hedda Gabler and the penny suddenly drops: her character is like one of those avenging Ibsenite furies who believes the truth must be told at all costs. And Redgrave, her face scrubbed of make-up, lifts the play on to another level by her capacity for emotional directness and scorching honesty. She turns sexual melodrama into moral debate.
As before, Corin Redgrave as Latymer subtly suggests the panic-stricken private figure hiding behind the international celebrity, and the fear induced by repressive anti-homosexual laws. And Kika Markham, as his long-suffering German wife, not only deploys an impeccable accent but faithfully catches the pathos of isolation.
It may not be Coward's best or most technically expert play but what it powerfully conveys is the terrible cost of living a life in which one's sexuality is denied.
