It’s amazing to think that after very nearly 100 years Noel Coward has never really been out of fashion. There are those who argue that the world he portrayed presented a rarefied atmosphere where his glamourous mortals were protected from everything except the popping of champagne corks and the repeated thuds of grouse hitting the deck. They would say that watching a Noel Coward play is like going to the zoo and seeing colourful creatures one would never normally encounter and not being at all surprised to discover that many of them are extinct. But there’s the joy. It’s like watching Downton Abbey or Big Brother. We veer between envy and schadenfreude and love every minute of it.

Fallen Angels, written in 1925 and Coward’s second big hit, is on at the Everyman, Cheltenham this week and is a case in point. The story concerns two rare and exotic birds (to continue my metaphor) whose feathers get well and truly ruffled. The action takes place in a beautiful, sunlit room that looks like a palace but turns out only to be a flat. It is a wonderful set by Paul Farnsworth that really puts you in the mood the minute the curtain rises. The play has been updated to the fifties (or thereabouts) and gives the impression of being a much more modern piece than its date suggests. However, I think the fact that it was written in the early twenties is significant. It was a time of hedonism and devil-may-care where people thought if they could survive the First World War they could survive anything. Consequently caution was thrown to the wind and tomorrow was another day.

But back to the plot. Two forty-something-plus, contentedly if not happily, married ladies discover that a suave French lover they shared fifteen years earlier, before they were married, is back in town and wants to see them. This naturally puts them in a bit of a tizz and they gradually work themselves up into a frenzy with the aid of a bottle or two of bubbly. Seeing drunken women is not, as we know from our Friday evening strolls down the High Street, necessarily the most attractive sight but both Jenny Seagrove and Sara Crowe manage to make the pair’s gradual slide into intoxication hilarious. At times it borders on farce with lots of falling backwards over the sofa and legs in the air.

The sight of them giggling like teenage pop fans at the prospect of meeting their idol is laugh-out-loud funny – and all that over a Frenchman. We British in those days were known for the stiffness of our upper lip and not the weakness of our knees so the sight of these two women who should have known better risking everything, is doubly rib-tickling.

I think Noel Coward, like Oscar Wilde, demonstrates that although some people live what appear to be privileged lives and inhabit rarefied atmospheres, underneath we are all the same and whether you have a diamond ring on your hand or rubber gloves, everyone is subject to the same temptations, aspirations and disappointments.

Fallen Angels is a good, old-fashioned drawing-room comedy and I enjoyed it more than anything similar I have seen in a long time. Highly recommended.   – Michael Hasted

FALLEN ANGELS at the Everyman Cheltenham9th – 14th September 2013