This week at the Oxford Playhouse the English Touring Theatre are putting on a set of Noel Coward plays. This is quite fashionable – over the past year or so, I’ve seen quite a number of Coward’s short plays grouped together to create an evening of theatre. The company has taken on the ambitious task of performing nine plays over the space of a few days, under the headings Cocktails, Dinner, and Dancing.
Tonight I saw the set entitled Dinner, composed of Ways and Means, Fumed Oak, and Still Life. This grouping of plays is aptly labelled – Ways and Means is a light yet complex appetizer, Fumed Oak is the rich main course, Still Life is dessert, but nothing too sweet, more like some bitter dark chocolate and a stiff drink.
Ways and Means takes place in a bedroom. A married couple, obviously in the midst of some kind of tiff, are eating breakfast in bed. We quickly discover that they are having money problems, and that they have no idea how to solve the issue. This witty little play unravels quickly, with a large incidental cast, although the couple, played by Kirsty Besterman and Gyuri Sarossy are definitely the stars. Their onstage chemistry is marvellous, with every lifted eyebrow and sigh of frustration raising gusts of laughter from the audience recognising their own familial squabbles.
Fumed Oak is a vastly different piece. From a holiday home in the Cote d’Azur, we are thrust into a tenement in South London, where a family go about their humdrum lives, until the father starts acting very strangely. The cast of this kitchen sink drama is fairly standard – nagging wife, silent husband, bitter mother-in-law, unsatisfied teenager – but the arc of the narrative is unexpectedly amusing and tragic by turns. Olivia Poulet is particularly excellent as the shrewish wife, Doris, who can’t see what is happening with her husband Henry until it’s too late.
Still Life is the only play of the three with which I am already familiar (it’s the play on which Brief Encounter is based). Set in a railway station refreshment room, it’s the story of two married people, Alec and Laura, who meet by chance and fall in love. Their narrative is cleverly juxtaposed with that of the tea-room workers, Mrs Bagot and Beryl, both of whom have humble and uncomplicated relationships which sit as contrast to the passionate, yet ultimately doomed relationship of the main couple. This is a heartbreaking piece of writing, and there’s something about the quietness of a theatre during a Noel Coward silence that can’t quite be described.
I thoroughly enjoyed Tonight at 8.30, and if you like elegant costumes, nuanced silences, and sparkling dialogue, I suggest you snap up tickets for all nine plays and overdose on Noel Coward this week. ★★★★☆ @BookingAround
