Matthew Warchus (2019)
This revival of Noël Coward’s Present Laughter ran for a limited season at the Old Vic from mid-June to mid-August 2019. A performance during the last week of the run was broadcast live to cinemas; Sally and I saw a recording of the broadcast at Curzon Richmond. The play was preceded by a pair of introductions – first from Dustin Lance Black (the writer of Milk), next from Matthew Warchus and the cast, headed by Andrew Scott. Black’s contribution, which he read inexpertly from autocue, was otiose and irritating. Telling the audience that what they’ll be seeing is wonderful, as he did, is liable to be counterproductive: at the least, it reinforces your determination to make up your own mind.
Warchus and his actors talked quite a bit about reinterpreting Coward’s eighty-year-old[1] comedy to reflect modern, more enlightened sexual attitudes. In Andrew Scott’s phrase, ‘It’s been good to emancipate the play’. The protagonist Garry Essendine is a big-name theatre actor, fearfully entering middle-age and approaching career decline. The narcissistic Garry needs admiration and attention from others (as Warchus points out in the programme note, the curious surname Essendine is an anagram of neediness). At the same time, he feels suffocated by his celebrity. The three-act play shows him contending with, among others, his nearly ex-wife, Liz; his critical but loyal secretary, Monica Reed; his manager, Morris Dixon; his producer, Henry Lyppiatt; and Henry’s wife, Joanna. These are the members of Garry’s inner circle or, as he calls them, his ‘family’. He also has to deal with the attentions of a couple of young devotees: Daphne Stillington, a groupie with theatrical ambitions; and Roland Maule, an unhinged playwright. Act I begins on the morning after Daphne has spent the night chez Garry; Act II ends on the morning after Joanna has done likewise. Peter Hall wrote of Present Laughter (in his diaries for the period 1972-80), ‘what a wonderful play it would be if – as Coward must have wanted – all those love affairs were about homosexuals’.
Warchus’s version of Present Laughter goes some way towards adjusting things in just that way by gender-switching the characters of Henry and Joanna Lyppiatt. Garry’s manager is now Helen (Suzie Toase), who’s married to Joe (Enzo Cilenti). He’s been having a clandestine affair with Morris (Abdul Salis), who adores him, but Joe really desires Garry, whom he succeeds in seducing. When all is revealed to all concerned in the closing stages, it also emerges that Helen has been in a secret relationship with another woman. I’m ambivalent about these changes. Pace Peter Hall, the substitution of straight proxies for gay characters in the work of Coward (and of other homosexual writers of the period like Terence Rattigan) gives an unspoken tension to, and sometimes deepens the interest of, the plays in question. Besides, I’m not sure that changing the sexes of characters without significant other changes to the text of Present Laughter is sufficient. In the context of this production, though, you can hardly complain that Joanna has become Joe. The dependably good (and versatile) Enzo Cilenti is outstanding among the supporting cast. The exchange that ends with Garry succumbing to Joe is emotionally richer than any other.
It’s widely assumed that Garry Essendine is a self-portrait of Noël Coward, who originated the role. Photographs of the 1942 production show him dressed in a silk dressing-gown – looking, in other words, just as we expect Coward to look. We take it as read that he also sounded as we expect him to sound. He casts a long shadow over the play. It’s not surprising that a present-day interpreter of Garry wants to distinguish himself decisively from Coward. Andrew Scott’s much-admired portrayal (awarded this year’s Evening Standard Best Actor prize a few days ago) is a physical and vocal tour de force. It must be an exhausting performance to give; it’s exhausting to receive too.
Other characters keep telling Garry that he’s an inveterate actor to the extent that he never stops acting – and can’t see that he never stops. Scott certainly vindicates these remarks. He also repeatedly impresses with his comic timing and vocal dexterity. What he does demands great skill, as well as colossal stamina. Yet it’s based in an essentially reductive idea of acting as egomaniac showing off – and becomes an example of just that. Garry’s relentless performing is affecting only when Joe is seducing him, and Garry resorts to pretence in an unavailing attempt to resist.
I might feel differently about Scott’s playing if we hadn’t seen his Hamlet in the West End two years ago (in the flesh rather than via a cinema screen). There too he was tirelessly witty but increasingly gave the impression that his priority was a series of inventive, unexpected line readings rather than coherent characterisation. He achieved his main aim, in spite of a speech pattern uncannily like Graham Norton’s – a resemblance that’s even harder to ignore listening to Scott’s Garry. There’s another, surprising issue. At forty-three, he’s exactly the age Noël Coward was in the original production and a couple of years older than Garry is meant to be. Andrew Scott should be just the right age yet he looks too boyish, not remotely on the turn – another element that detracts from Garry’s supposed vulnerability.
Like it or not, there’s a logic to Scott’s interpretation but why is nearly everyone else competing with his high-energy, high-decibel performance? (Scott wins the competition hands down.) Garry makes his first entrance to join Monica (Sophie Thompson) and Daphne (Kitty Archer) on stage. The effect of this trio going full tilt is disorienting: you know there are three different characters speaking but you seem to be hearing the one, same, exaggerated voice. Sophie Thompson’s swooping vocals are particularly disappointing – a re-run of what she did so enjoyably (along with much more) as Adelaide in the Guys ‘n’ Dolls that Sally and I saw at the Savoy Theatre in 2015. When Thompson calms down in Monica’s last scene with Garry, she’s expressive and touching – making what’s gone before seem all the more a waste of her eccentric talents.
The same thing happens, in miniature, with Liza Sadovy as the emphatically Scandinavian cleaner, Miss Erikson: her best moment is the only moment that Sadovy doesn’t overplay. (She doubles up as Daphne’s aunt, a wheelchair-bound dowager, in a more broadly farcical scene that suits her histrionics better.) Luke Thallon’s turn as Roland Maule takes some doing but is the most blatant attempt to take Andrew Scott on at his own game. No wonder that Joshua Hill, contrastingly naturalistic as Garry’s droll manservant Fred, scores a hit with nearly every line: he speaks rather than shrieks. Indira Varma’s Liz is more varied than most of the others; it’s a pity her range extends to blandness. In this company, Enzo Cilenti’s strong presence, in combination with his easy, effective switches of mood and pace, is manna from heaven.
Yet the theatre audience, whose reactions naturally drowned out most of those in the cinema, laughed loudest when the acting was at its coarsest. Plenty of people seem to feel the art of stage acting is a matter of putting on an improbable voice, exaggerating it as much as possible and expending maximum physical energy – regardless of whether any of this makes sense in terms of character or situation. I realise the style of playing here wouldn’t have been so overpowering watched in a theatre. Most of the time, the camera was quite close in on the action. In a smallish space like Curzon Richmond’s single screen, the players seemed on top of you in a way they couldn’t have been in the stalls and circle of the Old Vic. We saw the play through but were unhappily glad to get out. Present Laughter, which Noël Coward considered ‘a very light comedy … written with the sensible object of providing me with a bravura part’, is recognised as having an underlying strain of melancholy but watching it was a thoroughly lowering experience. It left me feeling guilty for loathing most of what the hard-working cast was doing, and depressed about what punters want from a visit to the theatre.
28 November 2019
[1] Coward wrote the play in 1939 although the outbreak of war delayed its performance until 1942.
