Anyone awaiting the second series of Rivals can sate their desires with this new play by Laura Wade who follows her episodes of Jilly Cooper’s 80s Rutshire bonkbuster with an adaptation of W Somerset Maugham’s almost century-old comedy of manners. The RSC’s production serves its own tennis-court lust, flagrant philandering, poisonous gossip and fabulous fashion.
In Maugham’s play, 36-year-old Constance responds to her surgeon-husband John’s affair with her best friend, Marie-Louise, by gaining economic independence through her new career as an interior decorator. Wade retains the 1920s Harley Street setting, trims the list of characters and gives space to Constance’s maternal concerns. She also seamlessly integrates some extremely funny one-liners alongside Maugham’s while gaining extra gags from riffing on his dated expressions such as “you’re a brick”. The play remains the same drawing-room comedy but plumped up, stylishly rearranged and with a fresh coat of paint (we’ll get to Anna Fleischle and Cat Fuller’s sumptuous designs later).
One of Wade’s principal changes is to explode the play’s straightforward chronology of three acts separated by the passing of a fortnight and a year respectively. She brings forward the moment in which Marie-Louise’s husband Mortimer bursts in to expose her affair and, in a lengthy flashback, adds a new scene to show Constance catching them in the act when she returns from dropping off their daughter at a Yorkshire boarding school brilliantly referred to as “Wuthering Gymslips”. Witnessing that discovery, and her mutual confidences with the butler Bentley (given a deepened character), heightens empathy for Constance who was rather more crisply calculated as written by Maugham.
In the lead role, Game of Thrones’Rose Leslie– back on stage after a nine-year absence – arrives like a summer breeze in cool blue sailor chic. Leslie captures what Maugham called Constance’s “alert mind” and succeeds in the tricky balance of composed resolve with rawer emotion.
Despite the innuendo, some choice double-takes and the frantic cover-ups, Tamara Harvey’s poised and perfectly cast production finds more humour in a raised eyebrow or pursed lip than anything farcical. The more larkily handled scene changes, with swerving fireplace and slo-mo cast moves, have not yet quite gelled with the rest of the evening. Jamie Cullum’s original jazz compositions, alternately bristling and velvety, complement both mood and milieu while bringing their own comic notes accentuated by Ryan Day’s perky lighting design.
Fleischle’s set, with its elegant curves, screens and geometric patterns, is adorned with a chaise longue and painted in shades that evoke Fortnum & Mason’s lavish confectionery. Fleischle and Fuller’s costumes heighten the imperiousness of Constance’s mother (Kate Burton) as much as the shrewdness of her sister, Martha (Amy Morgan, in a role gaining elements of the excised character Barbara).
Wade astutely reckons with the double standards and hypocrisies at play and frankly considers the financial and emotional investments of marriage and the ways in which marital harmony is sustained after the first flush of romance. While the play’s take on generational shifts in feminism recalls Wade’sHome, I’m Darling– and these 1920s debates feel apt today – there is also a meta playfulness, never overdone, akin to her comedyThe Watsons.
Some choice observations about theatre match a clever self-awareness in the staging. In one scene, Constance recognises the audience as another set of neighbours waiting to judge her reaction as “the wronged woman”. When Martha tells her sister that her next move could become a blueprint for others it is almost as if she is speaking to Ibsen’s Nora.
Emma McDonaldis ridiculously good as the calculating Marie-Louise, grovelling towards Constance on her knees for forgiveness, even if as in Maugham’s play you never believe their friendship in the first place. John (Luke Norris), Mortimer (Daniel Millar) and Constance’s puppyishly devoted Bernard (Raj Bajaj) remain more purely comical as in the original but Mark Meadows’ devotion as Bentley cuts deeper.
It’s a roundly well-acted and sophisticated evening that offers plenty of light delight while seriously considering a marriage rerouted not by a seven-year itch but a 15-year switch.
At theSwan theatre, Stratford-upon-Avon, until 2 August