THE CONSTANT WIFE
Photos: Michaela Bodlovic
From the very start this production breathes elegance and sophistication. The stylish set, in every sense rather traditional, cleverly comes to life with effective gauzes revealing the stairwell of the Harley Street home and surgery of the Middleton family. Shifting the time line of Somerset Maugham’s original is cleverly achieved with a few simple staging conceits and the whole atmosphere is completed by Jamie Cullum’s delightful score which takes jazz age sounds infused with a more contemporary feel. And this is perhaps the key to Laura Wade’s reworking of the 1926 original, taking a story of marital infidelity and societal expectations, leaving them firmly in period whilst simultaneously giving them a contemporary relevance.
This is a comedy of manners, Wade already having explored bad manners in her earlier work Posh, and marital manners in Home, I’m Darling, here she makes the very most of a story that oozes female emancipation, an era of change that when first written must have seemed very daring and yet to this day has the same poignancy.
Tamara Harvey’s direction is pin sharp, precisely mannered and clipped tones to evoke that period charm, whilst never abandoned, are gently softened and to great effect. Lines are delivered with such precision that not a nuanced moment is thrown away, the laughs come so naturally that the whole rolls out with amusing delicacy on one level and razor sharp wit on another. It is a pure delight.
Kara Tointon is marvellous as the wronged wife Constance, calmly dealing with her husband’s extramarital affair. She sweeps around the stage with such composure that her tolerance of the situation is utterly compelling, where is the anger, where is the hurt and why is she behaving the way she does. She contains the intrigue of the whole so well.
Sara Crowe is once again magnificent, this time as the rather stately mother Mrs Culver, all manners and concern for what society might think. The thread of thought that all women should accept that men are all going to be unfaithful is delivered with hilarious resignation. I might also add that this excellent actor seems to be defying age and where it not for her rather more matronly costumes could be perfectly believable playing the lead role!
Amy Vicary-Smith is the sister Martha Culver, a sturdy and ambitious woman who is bucking the fashion of the age that all women should be hell bent on marriage and raising a family, and instead has created her own interior design business. Her ambition is to reveal the infidelity in her sisters marriage, but at almost every turn she is thwarted and mainly by the mother. There is such precision in their comic timing, masterly work if you can forgive the masculine gender of that word. And that is very much the point of the whole, that realisation that the toxic masculinity, so much a part of life, has to change, both in the past setting of the play and to this very day. She also has a wonderful moment in act two when Mrs Culver suggests that she is a confirmed spinster, and declares that her life is not without romance or passion, a statement that is left intriguingly open ended…
Gloria Onitiri is the deliciously flamboyant best friend Marie-Louise Durham and secret mistress, daringly promiscuous and indeed, something of an air head, casually dismissing her wrong doings like yesterdays fashions, and there is no masking of her sexuality and appeal to John Middleton, even at one point coping with the most enormous pair of knickers!
Of course the male roles are so equally important in this story. Tim Delap is an utter cad, arrogant, entitled and dashingly handsome, it is easy to believe that Constance loves him, despite his failings.
Alex Mugnaioni is perfectly elegant and reserved as Constance’s devoted suitor from her youth and now returning some fifteen years on and is equally enthralled. He delivers the role with total charm, a fine sense of reserve that, when required, bursts into embarrassed passion, only to be quickly kept in check.
Jules Brown is Mortimer Durham, the wronged husband of Marie-Louise and the saddest victim of the plot, cheated on, exploited and inevitably cheated on again and no doubt again. The indignant anger displayed is utterly believable and then the sad and stupid acceptance of a string of lies fully exposes his cuckolded buffoonery.
Finally Philip Rahm is the butler Bentley, opening the whole by surveying the stage and the audience before settling at the piano and delivering the final bars of Cullum’s score, and I was close enough to see that he appears to be actually playing. But above all it is stolid presence that marks his presence, he total devotion and loyalty and a wonderful moment when he shares with Constance that it is not his mother, or a woman that he has just spent the night with. This is no shuffling stately old retainer but a real man, with manners and integrity.
I mentioned in starting the elegant and effective set, which it certainly is, but it also cleverly restrained. This provides the most wonderful backdrop for perhaps the best set of costumes I have seen in a very log time. The jazz age, art deco and all that was never better recorded than in the work of Parisian artist Erté, sharply detailed, cunningly asymmetrical patterns, long lines, flowing shapes, all here in the fine work of designer Anna Fleischele and co-costume designer Cat Fuller. Beautiful and clearly expensive fabrics, a stunning palette, and exquisite detailing, who beyond the front few rows would see those lines of covered buttons rising beyond the elbows of that soft Naples yellow jacket? I certainly did, and the cutting, the fine tailoring of both the women’s and men’s clothes. This was polished to a level that we seldom see.
Did I like it? Too right I liked it, let’s have more of this, a brilliant re-working, respectfully, of a classic. I left the theatre fully intending to get hold of the original script to wonder at just how clever this now contemporary piece of theatre has been made.
Andrew Kay
23 February
Theatre Royal Brighton
Rating:
