In this high-octane, fists-pumping, go-Team GB summer, there will undoubtedly be some who favour the idea of an unashamedly old-fashioned evening’s entertainment harking back to less frenzied times. This enjoyable musical biography of friends and friendly rivals Noël Coward and Ivor Novello, born within six years of each other at the end of the 19th century, will fit the bill perfectly. The gents wear white tie, the ladies evening dresses, and it’s all wit and panache — with nothing to startle the horses — from here to the big finale.
Adrian Fisher, who also plays a pleasingly lookalike Coward, has put this tribute together slickly. The hits keep rolling — shamefully, I didn’t remember that it was Novello who wrote Keep the Home Fires Burning — interspersed with spoken word snippets about the lives of these men who, as Coward so crisply put it, “were the darlings of the age, at a very young age”. Darren Bennett niftily suggests the matinee idol persona that Novello so seamlessly assumed.
A show of this kind inevitably leads to the odd awkward moment of enforced bonhomie, but director Richard Digby Day keeps the squirm factor pleasingly low. There’s a particularly cherishable interpretation of Don’t Put Your Daughter on the Stage, Mrs Worthington, which is interspersed by the mothers of Coward and Novello (Margaret Preece and Nova Skipp) engaging in fierce one-upmanship about their offspring’s precocious childhoods. Don’t go expecting your world view to be uprooted, but do anticipate some happy humming along.
The Two Most Perfect Things runs until July 21 (020 8237 1111, riversidestudios.co.uk).
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