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Telegraph
02-07-2025
- Entertainment
- Telegraph
Somerset Maugham's cheating husband comedy gets the Rivals treatment
The Constant Wife, Somerset Maugham 's neglected 1926 comedy about a marriage rendered wretched by infidelity might seem like an odd choice for the RSC. Yet, as revived by the company's co-artistic director Tamara Harvey – using a deft new script by Laura Wade, who wrote the recent steamy TV adaptation of Jilly Cooper's, Rivals – it lightly asks big questions about relationships and empowerment. A luminous Rose Leslie leads the fine cast as Constance, a woman who is being cheated on by her husband John, a Harley Street doctor, but stands by him the better to forge a different life. Wade tucks in new lines in keeping with Maugham's droll, Wildean dialogue. Her most daring move, though, is to restructure his plot: she brings forward a showdown (from Act II) in which the stoutish Mortimer (Daniel Millar) – whose wife has been having an affair with John (Luke Norris) – arrives to confront the adulterous pair. In its day, it must have been a pretty incendiary scene. Maugham has Constance counter-intuitively take up the cudgels on behalf of the duplicitous couple, protesting their innocence while indicating to the duo that she knows all about their betrayal. Adding another layer, Wade drops in a flashback, which shows Constance, unseen, witnessing the infidelity. This approach cuts more quickly to the fact that Constance is keeping up appearances, and putting on an act. At once, the evening gains more humour from this knowingness (there are added allusions to the theatricality of the tangled affairs, too) and further stabs of pain, as many lines, from early on, carry a subtext of concerted deflection and repression. Leslie (who starred on TV in Game of Thrones and, off-screen, married its heart-throb, Kit Harington) is terrific as a woman who – rather like Nora in Ibsen 's A Doll's House – has a nominally pampered life, but in fact is suffocating from a lack of agency. Clipped and clear-eyed, Leslie brings a winning insouciance to the aphoristic dialogue, as though merely arranging silverware, but it's serrated stuff. There are notable parallels with Maugham's life, which was dogged by marital unhappiness, stoked by the author's homosexual affairs. Constance turns to interior design as a route to independence – just as Maugham's wife, Syrie Wellcome, did. But there's something more broadly generational and lastingly pertinent, too, about this wronged woman's cool-headed strategy for survival. She must overcome the sexist, conformist attitudes of the age, many of them brazenly articulated by her interfering, Lady Bracknell-ish mother (a superb Kate Burton). She also has to reconcile a demand for true happiness with a recognition that even a marriage that has dimmed can still be worth the candle. This nuanced dilemma feels at once both wholly of its period and utterly modern – and fully warrants the further life that Maugham's play is given here.
Times
02-07-2025
- Entertainment
- Times
The Constant Wife review — Rose Leslie is a jaunty cuckolded heroine
A frothily radical Twenties comedy rejigged for the modern palate? The omens were good for the RSC's Stratford premiere of Laura Wade's adaptation of W Somerset Maugham's 1926 play, which puts a cuckolded wife in the driver's seat rather than the dregs of despair. Wade is often a dab hand at mixing privilege, pain and humour: she writes for the TV version of Jilly Cooper's Rivals and wrote the play Posh. Her last work with her director, Tamara Harvey (also co-artistic director of the RSC), was the riveting domestic comedy Home, I'm Darling. However you split the credit here, though, The Constant Wife is a letdown. It's the sort of evening that is studded with sharp lines, where you can see the sharp ideas and the good intentions, but it simply isn't funny enough to take off for long. Rose Leslie is a fine actress in Game of Thrones and beyond. She makes no mistakes exactly as Constance, the Harley Street doctor's wife who takes an outwardly jaunty, peculiarly pragmatic approach to his affair with her best friend. And yet in her first stage role for nine years Leslie lacks the vocal power and shared sense of fun to make Constance relishable company as she lets loose. • Read more theatre reviews, guides and interviews Light comedy like this calls for an outwardly effortless quality in which everything and nothing matters. Leslie, like most of the cast, handles its demands rather than excels at them. Luke Norris, say, as her husband John, is too fixed in his dashing demeanour for his massive hypocrisies to intrigue. Only Kate Burton — daughter of Richard, star of Grey's Anatomy, a Constance herself on Broadway in 2005 — really has those sort of effortless chops. She owns every barb as Constance's OTT mother, Mrs Culver, who thinks that men are natural rogues and women should accept their lot. Wade adds jokes, moves lines, merges two characters and expands another, cuts liberally and acutely. Her bigger structural intervention of putting one scene a year in the past, though, makes Constance's subversiveness drag. It ascends into farce a few times, and the plot recap at the start of Act II earns its laughs, but this take on Maugham's feminist fun lacks the ease about itself to segue between high comedy and Shavian earnestness. The Twenties set, by the usually excellent Anna Fleischle, is starkly modernist enough to make it feel as if the characters are rattling around the big thrust stage. An ending that mixes revenge, forgiveness, deception and realism about dwindling marital passion is spoilt by being so laboured. Imagine Ibsen's A Doll's House, only this time Nora has a lucrative side hustle as an interior designer with which to aid her emancipation.★★☆☆☆140minSwan Theatre, Stratford, to Aug 2, Follow @timesculture to read the latest reviews
The Guardian
01-07-2025
- Entertainment
- The Guardian
The Constant Wife review – Rose Leslie and Laura Wade let fresh light into Maugham's drawing room
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's Home, I'm Darling – and these 1920s debates feel apt today – there is also a meta playfulness, never overdone, akin to her comedy The 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 McDonald is 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 the Swan theatre, Stratford-upon-Avon, until 2 August
The Age
23-04-2025
- Entertainment
- The Age
Posh boys run riot in a night dissecting power and privilege
Posh Old Fitz April 22. Until May 11 ★★★★½ They wear their entitlement as effortlessly as their tailcoats. The young members of an Oxford University elite dining club gather for a night of food, wine and mayhem at a rural pub. Posh boys will be boys, right? What begins as satire – and upper-class twats are easy targets – becomes increasingly malevolent in this dissection of how powerful networks are shaped and influence wielded. The Riot Club at the centre of Laura Wade's 2010 play is loosely based on the Bullingdon Club, an all-male Oxford student club known for lavish dinners and appalling behaviour. Former British prime ministers David Cameron and Boris Johnson are among its past members. A dining table set with silverware and crystal dominates the carpeted stage and panelled walls. Soham Apte's set is probably the Old Fitz's most lavish. A large cast on the tiny stage for most of the night is a challenge, even without the dining table. But this tightly choreographed piece directed by Margaret Thanos never falters. As the 10 members arrive, two reveal how their college rooms have been trashed in initiation rituals. Another is brutalised for breaking the club's code of silence. He's forced to drink wine into which his band of boozy brothers have added pepper, snot and worse. But they direct their worst behaviour towards outsiders – anyone lower down the food chain from themselves. The misogyny towards a call-girl (Scarlett Waters) is breathtaking. They bully and patronise the pub's working-class landlord (Mike Booth) and his waitress daughter (Dominique Purdue). When they discover their 10-bird main course roast is one bird short, they set the landlord in their sights, and the play takes a dark turn.
Sydney Morning Herald
23-04-2025
- Entertainment
- Sydney Morning Herald
Posh boys run riot in a night dissecting power and privilege
Posh Old Fitz April 22. Until May 11 ★★★★½ They wear their entitlement as effortlessly as their tailcoats. The young members of an Oxford University elite dining club gather for a night of food, wine and mayhem at a rural pub. Posh boys will be boys, right? What begins as satire – and upper-class twats are easy targets – becomes increasingly malevolent in this dissection of how powerful networks are shaped and influence wielded. The Riot Club at the centre of Laura Wade's 2010 play is loosely based on the Bullingdon Club, an all-male Oxford student club known for lavish dinners and appalling behaviour. Former British prime ministers David Cameron and Boris Johnson are among its past members. A dining table set with silverware and crystal dominates the carpeted stage and panelled walls. Soham Apte's set is probably the Old Fitz's most lavish. A large cast on the tiny stage for most of the night is a challenge, even without the dining table. But this tightly choreographed piece directed by Margaret Thanos never falters. As the 10 members arrive, two reveal how their college rooms have been trashed in initiation rituals. Another is brutalised for breaking the club's code of silence. He's forced to drink wine into which his band of boozy brothers have added pepper, snot and worse. But they direct their worst behaviour towards outsiders – anyone lower down the food chain from themselves. The misogyny towards a call-girl (Scarlett Waters) is breathtaking. They bully and patronise the pub's working-class landlord (Mike Booth) and his waitress daughter (Dominique Purdue). When they discover their 10-bird main course roast is one bird short, they set the landlord in their sights, and the play takes a dark turn.
