REVIEW: There’s much to admire in the RSC’s update of The Constant Wife, **** four stars

REVIEW: There’s much to admire in the RSC’s update of The Constant Wife, **** four stats

How many control freaks does it take to create a decent play?

In this case, the answer is four.

It’s only right and proper we should start with the original author, W. Somerset Maugham, a popular writer back in the 1920s who ditched the stage for novels and short stories because, as he told his somewhat more talented contemporary Noel Coward, “I cannot tell you how I loathe the theatre. It is all very well for you, you are author, actor and producer. What you give an audience is all your own; the rest of us have to content ourselves with at the best an approximation of what we see in the mind's eye. After one has got over the glamour of the stage and the excitement, I do not myself think the theatre has much to offer the writer compared with the other mediums in which he has complete independence and need consider no one.”

WSM was also a closet gay who, scared stiff by what happened to one of his heroes, Oscar Wilde, married, had kids and led a furtive lifestyle trying to keep his sexuality under wraps by taking long excursions abroad.

The second on our menu is Constance Middleton, the character he created and for whom the play is named. Constance, who finds herself in a 15-year marriage betrayed by her husband with her best friend, takes the situation in hand and, instead of reacting in a jealous rage, seeking divorce and what have you, decides to keep the peace and carry on regardless, gaining financial independence and becoming boss of her own world – a situation the playwright must have fantasised about even as he was bringing her to life.

The third is Laura Wade who has taken the play, first performed in 1926, and rewritten it for a modern audience. Wade has a history of theatrical control freak-ery. Her debut play, staged in 2005, was Colder Than Here about a woman dying of bone cancer who is obsessed with being in charge of every detail regarding her demise, while another work, 2010’s Posh, deals with trying to wrestle order from vicious chaos.

Wade has also adapted and interpreted other authors’ works for the stage and TV and there’s a kind of arrogance in taking something someone else has created and changing it to suit what you want it to do or say. In this instance the rewrite is intended to update a period piece to appeal to a modern audience within which themes can be emphasised and added to resonate with today.

Wade has done quite a number on Maugham and, considering his attitude to collaboration, one might detect some spinning going down in his grave.

The last, but by no means least of our quartet is Tamara Harvey, the RSC’s co-artistic director who has chosen to rekindle the working relationship with Wade that began in 2018 with Home, I’m Darling and direct this production, presumably to make darn sure it turns out to her liking.

The upshot of this combo is that The Constant Wife is an easy, often delightful and sometimes very funny watch. It’s one of those pieces where, although the actors appear to be in conversation with one another, the primary motive behind their exposition is to deliver witty wisecracks to impress the audience, a series of smart soundbites to show off how very clever the brains behind it all are.

Rose Leslie is a spiffing Constance, determined not to submit to the manner in which society expects her to react. Wade has given her a vulnerability that Maugham didn’t. When she quietly walks in and, undetected, comes upon her husband in flagrante with her bosom buddy she weeps before regaining her composure, allowing us to share the emotional journey she must travel to own her own person.

The traitorous pal, Marie-Louise Durham, is nicely played with a vivacious cunning by Emma McDonald, the straying husband, Doctor John Middleton with smooth subterfuge by Luke Norris, and Constance’s busy-body mother Mrs Culver by Kate Burton who channels Edith Evans’ hilariously haughty Lady Bracknell from the movie version of Wilde’s The Importance Of Being Ernest as she embodies a generational shift in sexual attitudes uttering a series of memorably out-of-touch rhapsodies on the wifely duties due to the superior male.

Amy Morgan is Constance’s sister, Martha Culver, an amalgam of two characters written by Maugham. She’s the one who gets Constance to parlay her exquisite taste in furnishings etc into a business partnership while expressing a cynical view of traditional marriage which hints she may be a lesbian. Bentley the Butler, played with delicate propriety by Mark Meadows, is also given more of a role than Maugham meant him to have, revealing himself as visiting a secret male lover, perhaps a sympathetic nod to the original playwright’s own real-life predicament.

The role of Bernard Kersal, the chap who arrives back from business in Japan after a long absence, still in love with Constance, has been bestowed upon Raj Bajaj, the RSC’s recent go-to when it comes to big-hearted, naïve, kindly, honourable doofuses. Bajal is great at it but surely needs to change it up now before he gets too typecast.

Wade has messed with the timelines to make the action more dramatic. There’s a super flashback to set the plot into action, though the mechanical scene changes are a bit strange. Musically and fashion-wise it’s set amidst the upper crust 1920s in Harley Street but now and then a crude joke makes an uncomfortable century leap (“Up the West End”, indeed!). The meta bit immediately post-break when the actors discuss a play called The Constant Wife and Constance gets to say how she always needs a plot reminder after drinks in the interval and a recap is immediately delivered at some length by Martha is genuinely audacious.

There’s much to admire in the updating and the dissection of how a marriage is changed through the years from passionate love to affection to friendship is poignantly pivotal, a bit like Shakespeare’s seven ages of man. There is the odd rickety reference, though. When the play was written, women being responsible for their personal financial affairs was a revolutionary concept but you show me a bloke nowadays who feels emasculated by his partner taking a job to bring more money into the household and I’ll show you a lunatic.

The way this production ends is also a bit of a mystery. In the original, Constance goes off with Bernard on a six-week holiday, her husband having no choice but to accept the situation considering all he’s put her through. The impact of this tat-for-tat has been inexplicably softened by Wade so that the Bernard trip is revealed to us (but not to her hubby) as a ruse and Constance is just going off on her own for a jaunt, setting up an unconvincing and patently untrue cop-out that insists, “forgiveness tastes a great deal sweeter than revenge.”

Hey, c’mon! Pull the other one!

Four stars