At one point in Roy Marsden’s staging of this rediscovered Noël Coward play, Jenny Seagrove takes a record off the gramophone. It was hard to tell from halfway back in the stalls, but I rather thought it was an LP on the Island label, founded by Chris Blackwell, the son of Blanche Blackwell who was the real-life model for Seagrove’s character. Coward relocates the action from around his own expatriate community on Jamaica to a Micronesian island, and overdoes the symbology by sticking his characters on the slopes of a… yes… an intermittently active volcano.
    
The play was written in 1956, but received its première in a staged reading only in 1989, some 16 years after the author’s death. To say that this is unsurprising is a helpful equivocation. On the one hand, it has more than its share of clunking lines such as swaggering lothario Guy Littleton (Jason Durr)’s “Why do you so resolutely refuse to let me possess you?” and moderately upright Adela Shelley (Seagrove)’s reply, “Your definition of love is utterly different from mine.” When Guy’s wife Melissa arrives on the island, she is convinced but mistaken that he and Adela have had an affair; in reality, Guy is in the process of ensnaring “virginal” new arrival Ellen Danbury, whose husband in turn arrives intent on reconciliation, only to find… ah…
    
For much of the first act, it often seems like the most stilted kind of adultery-in-NW3 drama transposed to the South Pacific. Matters are modified slightly when Adela and the other women begin to have comparatively candid duologues. Even so, one cannot imagine the Lord Chamberlain having such conniptions at this material; it does little more than use the S-E-X word. Ah, but then the single smallest change possible makes all the difference: when the Danburys are discussing husband Keith’s recent “mere physical flare-up”, the pronoun of the lover in question is not “she” but “he”. And who was Keith’s first great never-transcended love? Nothing is explicit, but at that moment, enter Guy…
    
Seagrove is, as so often, adept at playing a passionate character whose passion is all offstage. Durr is all moustache and trousers, and Dawn Steele as his wife Melissa proves consummate at wet-blanketing every other character’s polite conversational gambits. This is not a great drama belatedly unveiled, but it is an agreeably intriguing way to pass an evening in the summer dog days.
     
Written for the Financial Times.