The Constant Wife (touring) ★★★

While the plays of Noël Coward and, to a lesser extent, those of Terrence Rattigan have experienced a revival after the sound and fury of the angry young playwrights of the Sixties subsided, Somerset Maugham’s fortunes have never been so successfully resuscitated. Having four plays running simultaneously in the West End in 1908 brought him financial reward but also cemented the critical notion that he was merely a crowd pleaser without merit, and a harmless entertainer.

Given that The Constant Wife wasn’t a hit when it opened in the Strand Theatre in 1927 (not helped by its leading lady insulting the audience), could there be something more to the play than conventional wisdom might suggest? Certainly the Oliver Award-winning playwright Laura Wade thinks so – enough to adapt it without making radical departures from the central tenets of the piece.

Everyone seems to know that Constance Middleton’s husband of fifteen years, John, is having an affair with her best friend, Marie-Louise. Her sister Martha wants to tell her; her traditionalist mother feels she should be kept in the dark. But when Mortimer, Marie-Louise’s husband, bursts in accusing the two of infidelity, the cat seems to be out of the bag. Constance resourcefully lies to protect her husband and her friend – and when Mortimer departs, she coolly reveals that she’s known about the affair for over a year, having walked in on the pair unnoticed.

Instead of a primarily emotional reaction, on discovering the affair, Constance begins to navigate her situation in practical terms. She eyes her immediate future with unflinching clarity. Immediately, she recognises the imperative for a woman to have financial independence. Wade takes Maugham’s strong, independent heroine and leans into the ahead-of-its-time feminist critique of women’s enforced economic reliance on men.

In terms of performances, both Amy Vicary-Smith as Martha and Jane Lambert as the imperious Mrs Culver successfully embody new vs old thinking and the leave-versus-stay advocates in Constance’s life while bagging some serious laughs in the process.

But success or failure of The Constant Wife lies heavily on the actor playing the titular protagonist. Kara Tointon possesses a quiet magnetism that draws the audience’s attention towards her at all times. Her Constance delivers elegant poise while implying a greater complexity just beneath the surface. The trouble with the role as written, as opposed to how it is being performed, is that Constance is so self-possessed, emotionally balanced and clear-sighted that there is no jeopardy – whatever she decides, she’ll be fine. Her ability to become financially independent within the year makes you wonder why she is still hanging around with these dolts. “Men are such simple creatures,” the script announces, and duly Wade writes John (Tim Delap), Bernard (Alex Mungnaioni) and Mortimer (Jules Brown) as terribly basic plot conduits. That these men are idiots or lapdogs removes any sense of risk from Constance’s moment of crisis. In building up her talents and skills to levels that dwarf the men around her, it renders her securing autonomy rather pyrrhic.

Frustratingly, the script is tonally as fickle as Constance’s husband. Despite Wade bringing the public reveal earlier in the proceedings, the pace of the opening act is ponderous, and director Tamara Harvey pushes the early scenes a little too languidly. The script adds some meta business – presumably as a theatrical canapé to sustain contemporary audiences. Constance and Bernard keep trying to head for an evening at the theatre to see something about “love and marriage and fidelity… it’s a farce”. As it turns out, the show they are going to see is, insert eye roll, The Constant Wife. But we are not done with the self-referential business. At the start of Act 2, Constance bemoans how after the interval, you always forget what’s happened in the first act and adds, “If only they’d do a little recap,” only for her sister to give a breathless recap. Yes, Vicary-Smith gets a huge laugh by giving it to the audience with both barrels – but beyond that, it’s hard to see what purpose it is serving. It does, however, highlight a question: what does this Constant Wife want to be? It’s not frenetic or funny enough to be a farce – but neither does it have sufficient substance or conflict to be a drama.

The script seems to scavenge around for whatever comedy it can find. When Tom suggests to Constance’s would-be suitor Bernard that he should “take my wife up the West End”, the audience gives a delayed laugh, questioning if the smutty entendre is intentional. Apparently so, with Constance subsequently asking her husband’s mistress, “Has John popped it in for you?” referring to Marie-Louise’s dodgy knee. Come for Cowardesque wit, get Carry On bawdy.

There certainly are positives, though. Anna Fleischle’s and Cat Fuller‘s costumes are eye-catchingly showy. The former’s set, moodily enhanced by Sally Ferguson‘s tasteful lighting design, is undoubtedly pleasing to the eye – with one exception. There is a flashback depicting the moment that Constance discovers the infidelity. The house transforms into the way it was before she decorated it with various degrees of slickness, but on the wall, next to some paint samples, are the words, “One year earlier”. Between this and the recap, how many Chenin Blancs down do the creatives expect their audience to be to need such spoonfeeding?

There’s something amiss with this production. It’s not the performances. It’s not the production values. And it’s certainly not in producer David Pugh‘s very reasonable pricing. Perhaps it’s in the halfway house of the adaptation? Wade’s take is more what she calls a slight polish-up rather than a reworking. But in that subtlety has crept a futility. Watchable? Yes. Diverting. Mostly. But to quote Maugham himself, “If you refuse to accept anything but the best, you very often get it.”