Back to the pleasure dome

10 April 2012

Noel Coward sprang a fresh, fine surprise upon London playgoers last night - almost 30 years after his death: Coward's Semi-Monde, banned in the 1920s for allegedly glamourising what used to be called immorality, has finally reached the West End.

It ought be given a real welcome and not just for producer Thelma Holt's selfless bravery in mounting an unknown Coward with a huge cast. For Semi-Monde's tableau of rich and idle pleasure-seekers letting their hair and traditional morality down in 1920s Paris, turns out to be provocatively different from anything else he ever wrote. Semi-Monde is easily his most experimental play.

Director Philip Prowse clearly relishes the challenge of putting an ever-mobile parade of 28 flirters and aspiring fornicators upon the stage. He himself has designed a sumptuous evocation of a Grand Hotel. In an initial theatrical coup, the stage is empty save for a piano and Nichola McAuliffe singing some nostalgic song. Then a great gold and glass dome is slowly lowered into place. As pink and gold confetti and balloons rain down, the Semi-Monde set in tuxedos and sexy cocktail dresses burst exuberantly upon the stage to join the song and dance. It's a tremendous image of that wild hedonism Coward sets out to condemn. The play offers witty vignettes of these smart, shallow folk, making and breaking their sexual relationships across the space of two years..

All the main sexual varieties are here: primarily the hetero, but the homo and lesbian too, and in one case the confused bisexual. Benedick Bates's bland Cyril Hardacre does not know which way to turn and so adopts a lucky-dip approach to sex. Having tried and abandoned a gay protector and a middle-aged lesbian opera singer, subject to big tantrums in Frances Tomelty's caricaturing performance , he succumbs to heterosexuality or as one acid queen puts it "reverts to the common-place". This happy consummation isn't typical. Otherwise, Coward levels his fire against dangerous riders on the sexual merry-go-round.

He abhors the fickle and fortune-hunting, liars and deceivers, whose transgressive exploits become the main dramatic lines of interest. John Carlisle, delightfully suave and languid as the middle-aged novelist Jerome and his daughter, Norma, whom Beth Cordingly makes far too common, launch affairs with Sophie Ward's enigmatic wife and Simon Dutton as her edgy husband. Nichola McAuliffe, in dazzling comic form as a terribly twenties air-head, and singing period songs with thrilling passion, launches herself upon a Russian who craves her money. This isn't, though, a conventional action. His main characters flirt and fight in duels of Coward's pared-down, pert and witty words for just a couple of minutes at a time before the merry-go-round moves on. The action keeps moving on to minor characters - to jealous lesbians, intriguing homosexuals and random heterosexuals, speaking in Coward's delightful blend of innuendo and code.

Prowse keeps the stage brimming with energy, waiters, clusters of hotel guests and piano music. His decision to advance the later action into the 1930s, with a hail of swastikas, Hitler's voice and Cyril in naval uniform lends Coward's indictment a sharp, prophetic sadness. But the updating doesn't entirely gell. Besides Semi-Monde fascinates as an experimental comedy that captures with scathing conviction the 1920s upper-middle classes in the grip of pleasure-fever.

Semi-Monde

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