There’s more than one way of looking at Coward’s most popular comedy. The more usual one is to take it at face value, as a sparkling concoction whose components we are not meant to take any more seriously than do its characters. Another is to start with the quartet and its matrimonial cat’s cradle of entanglements and treat them seriously as human beings.
That seems to be Edward Max’s preferred option for the second production of Frinton’s summer theatre season. It’s stylishly designed by Martin Robinson to emphasise the Art Déco ambiance, both for the first act with its twin balconies overlooking the Mediterranean and for the run-together second and third acts, set in Amanda’s Paris flat.
Laughs there are a-plenty as Amanda (Sophia Linden) jettisons her new husband Victor (Charles Davies in full tweedy British bulldog mode) in favour of the old one (a debonair Philip Benjamin as Elyot). But once we are in Paris, the jostling and jossing between Amanda and Elyot takes on darker overtones when the verbal sparring escalates into something much more physical.
It would be wrong, perhaps, to write 21st century sensibilities about domestic violence into what is after all a sophisticated comedy of manners – but the sense of something almost vicious leached into the climax of Act Two and spilled over into the final shouting match between Nicole Hartley’s Sibyl and Victor.
If Sibyl begins as a playful kitten, she seems set to mature into a tiger; Elyot’s throwaway remark from act one about her mother returns to mind here. Linden’s Amanda doesn’t completely suggest the woman at ease with her own sensuality and sense of adventure, but it’s a far more difficult role than Coward’s script might indicate. Elyot, after all, does have most of the best lines.
