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‘What’s the use of arguing and bickering like this?” a husband asks his wife in Easy Virtue. “It doesn’t lead anywhere.” He’s wrong, of course: it’s this kind of verbal fencing and simmering fury that would lead a 25-year-old Noël Coward to stardom.
Audiences may not know this early work, but in Trevor Nunn’s luxuriant new production they will know exactly where they are. Simon Higlett’s sumptuous drawing-room set comes complete with marble staircase for doleful exits and dramatic entrances and his 1920s outfits are accompanied by some of the best finger waves you’ll see outside Strictly’s Charleston week.
And to launch this dramedy of manners, here’s Greta Scacchi, positively boggling with horror as the matriarch who discovers her son has married a divorcee. Alice Orr-Ewing’s Larita, meanwhile, lands in the middle of her new family with the cool self-possession of a female aviator: sunglasses propped on head, scarf trailing, she drops her bag to the floor in a gesture that’s half curtsey, half statement of intent.
Stifled by country life, patronised by one smug sister-in-law and vengefully hated by another, Larita emerges as a modern heroine, as if someone had retooled the Bolter from Nancy Mitford’s novels as an Ibsen protagonist. (“My life is my own,” she declares at one point.) When the sniping, backbiting and passive aggression finally erupt, there’s a magnificent centrepiece monologue, although Coward doesn’t neglect the other characters in his large cast, from a surprisingly liberal father-in-law (an understated Michael Praed) to the thoughtful ex-girlfriend whose presence helps explore the play’s ideas on the “hideously intimate relationship” of marriage.
The comedy, residing in the social awkwardness of the D-word, may not land so well today, but the psychological honesty and the pathos are timeless. Coward’s repartee doesn’t exist solely to pierce hypocrisy and cant – it’s cover for heartbreak and loneliness. “Women of my type are so tiresome in love,” Larita admits. “We hammer at it, tooth and nail, until it’s all bent and misshapen.” You can’t help thinking of Amanda in Private Lives, which would be written five years later. In this production, we see Coward’s scorching emotional insight already ablaze.
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At the Arts theatre, Cambridge, until 7 March
