The Meaning of Zong and Afterplay – BBC Sounds

With light at the end of the tunnel for live performance and some of our biggest institutions announcing summer programmes at their venues, the BBC’s new Lights Up Festival has arrived at a moment of optimism, not just acting as a reminder of all the talented people and great work under threat from sustained closure but of the opportunities to come. Running across several weeks in March and April on BBC television and radio showcasing talented stars and writers, Lights Up has aired its first new play developed in association with the Bristol Old Vic and the National Theatre, but that’s not the only new theatre-related work being broadcast.

The Meaning of Zong

The first of these is Giles Terera’s The Meaning of Zong, a 100-minute piece reflecting on the long legacy of slavery, politics and identity by dramatising a court case which shed light on the murder of 132 slaves thrown overboard by the crew of a British transport ship which claimed it was running out of supplies. This real event from 1781 is an attempted cover-up by the British legal system and becomes the basis for the abolition movement, asking questions about the right to own and therefore destroy another human being.

Terera’s debut play directed by Tom Morris, was originally written for the stage and will undoubtedly find one soon because this first dramatisation already feels like a very visual experience and structurally, Terera employs three related layers through which to tell his story. The Meaning of Zong is framed in a modern day bookshop as a young woman questions the location of the volume she is holding while hearing the echoing voices of her antecedents trying to connect her identity to this story. The concept of shared pain and linked experience also feeds through the play’s other layers, the first in which Olaudah Equiano who requites his given name of Gustavas Vassa pursues the case in London enlisting support to interview witnesses and locate the truth, and the second which evocatively recreates the last days on ship as the possibility of death approaches.

Where you draw the line between what is ‘other’ and what is you is central to Terera’s piece, excavating concepts of racial oppression and disenfranchisement that reflect through the centuries, while also using the central relationship between Equiano and abolitionist supporter Granville Sharp to explore ingrained concepts of difference, privilege and charity that overcome basic principles of humanity and equality. That all this plays largely as a courtroom drama is testament to Terera’s skills as a debut dramatists, using the shape and purpose of the legislative process to motor the play and give it a time-bound structure while interrogating the falsely made claims and human cost of a terrible crime reported by the English court in its dry matter of fact style.

That this presents an opportunity for dramatic climax is something Terera carefully sidesteps, using the court’s decision not as the outcome of the play but the introduction to a third Act that examines the character’s longer history and connection through the centuries to those who have come before and since, as well inculcated assumptions that even the liberal Granville struggles to recognise. In the lead role Terera uses his character to explore the Establishment’s long-held prejudices and attempts to dehumanise both victims and perpetrators in the system, most notably and all too recognisably in a scene where the eighteenth-century equivalent of the police stop the innocent Equiano and roughly manhandle him because of his skin colour – an experience that links this play to those such as Ryan Calais Cameron’s Typical with Richard Blackwood available via Soho on Demand and films including The Obituary of Tunde Johnson shown during BFI Flare 2021 and Ken Fero’s documentary Ultraviolence from October’s London Film Festival.

Terera’s performance is pivotal to the three strands of storytelling, bringing them together in the experience of Equiano whose quiet determination drives The Meaning of Zong and draws together a diverse collection of characters which includes Michael Balogun’s (Terera’s understudy who brilliantly premiered in the Death of England: Delroy) agitator and fellow theatre star Samuel West who brings concern and energy to the role of Granville whose development during the play is marked by his own contention between compassionate humanitarian ideals and the realities of structured racism.

The trapped women on the ship awaiting death are the play’s lasting memory, hauntingly and poetically played by Monronke Akinola and Gloria Obianyo which upend the formal business and language of the British courtroom with the real human experience of suffering, fear and solidarity as they approach a certain death. And here the play links to Winsomme Pinnock’s Rockets and Blue Lights that also draws on Turner’s The Slave Ship painting and premiered as an audio drama when unable to perform in Manchester.

Afterplay

Though not badged as part of the Lights Up Festival, Brian Friel’s 45-minute piece Afterplay certainly belongs in the programme as the renowned playwright makes his own radio debut with a new play celebrating the work of Anton Chekhov starring the brilliant Janie Dee and Alex Jennings who are both superb. At the end of Uncle Vanya, when Sonya says ‘we must live out our lives’ there is little hope for a young woman whose spirit has already broken, when the man she loves has made his indifference clear and the family she relies on has become fractured. The yearning and unyielding emptiness – one of Chekhov’s favourite themes – is all that awaits Sonya and her like, forever dreaming of what might of been while trapped in the hard reality of dissatisfied existence.

Friel imagines Sonya a couple of decades later when the unvarying routines of her life are shaken up by the passing of her beloved Uncle Vanya and she must take a trip to the mythical allure of Moscow to settle the family business. There by chance in the same cafe over three nights, she meets and dines with Andrey, a musician escaping the clutching hold of his family’s estate for the chance to play the violin in the capital far away from his three sisters.

Directed by Martin Jarvis, Afterplay is a duologue between Sonya and Andrey, two of Chekhov’s beleaguered but level-headed characters who were largely observers of the complicated socio-economic and political struggles that taxed their families in the famous plays set years before, and Friel uses them to explore this concept of endurance that Chekhov tackles in Uncle Vanya and Three Sisters where life’s ills should be accepted uncomplainingly with hope of creating a better future. Returning these characters to the centre of those narratives allow us to revisit and reinspect the finality that the ending of those plays artificially imposed on their lives.

These are conclusions that Chekhov forsees as repetitious, that routine and the unchanging continuation of their existence marks a return to normality after a brief period of disruption caused by the actions of the play. In both, external figures intrude on the emotional harmony of the household and their retreat causes the family dynamic (which existed before even the audience enters the playing space) to resettle. Friel’s work wonders how true that is and speculates on the intervening years where that very continuation of life causes ripples and effects of its own, born directly from the upheaval of the original period of the play.

For Sonya, the relationship with Doctor Astrov – so beautifully and poignantly rendered in Ian Rickson’s production at the Harold Pinter Theatre filmed for the BBC – lumbers on in Afterplay as Friel picks-up on the unresolved chemistry between them and uses it to shape Sonya’s still devoted interior life. Hearing her casually refer to him as Michael is telling, a growth of intimacy that had not existed years before, with Friel suggesting that their mutual isolation has drawn the pair together socially despite their separation at the end of Uncle Vanya.

Astrov still fills her every thought and even with a stranger most of her conversation relates to him, his work with the poor, his enthusiasm for improving environmental conditions and crucially, his alcoholism which has taken much firmer hold in the intervening years and seems to predicate his moments of devoted yet still unresolved attachment to Sonya. She suggests too that although he is still unwilling to be with her, the notional death wish remains, putting himself in danger with his patients. Her admiration for him, though less girlish, is by no means dimmed as Friel elaborates on the rich psychology of Chekhov’s characters in later life.

Andrey by contrast is less openly in control of his own circumstances and quickly admits to lying about his reasons for being in Moscow. When Afterplay opens, this is Andrey and Sonya’s second meeting, having also found themselves in this cafe on the previous day and quickly Andrey admits having misled her. When the pair meet for the third time, Andrey corrects his stories once again and further details of his experience are revealed.

This tendency to lie, Friel suggests, comes less from an enjoyment at misleading others than a desire to give and maintain an outward social impression and status – another Chekhovian theme – that reinforces an illusion of class, success or personal happiness which does not exist. That Andrey clings to these ideals repeatedly, ever conscious of the impression his life makes on others is one of Friel’s most interesting interventions looking more broadly at this contrast between an individual’s exterior and interior existence.

For lovers of both plays, there are many interesting snippets as Friel speculates on what may have happened to the other characters while musing on the consequences of abandonment, betrayal and the yearn for impossible love that Sonya, Masha and even Natasha think will bring them contentment. The denial of these longings for material connection have significant consequences for the individual’s emotional stability and ability to endure, and Friel’s subtle exploration of the afterlife of these characters chimes brilliantly with Chekhov’s intentions in stranding them at the end of his plays.

Afterplay is a brief encounter but one that affectingly considers the later life of two Chekhovian characters left just to exist at the original end of their stories. That their subsequent lives continued and will continue to be shaped by the same notions of delusion, illusion and the empty pointlessness of their repetitive existence as imagined so well in Afterplay, leaves them psychologically and circumstantially precisely where Friel found them. Chekhov does the same, the circuitous nature of his plays returning his creations back to the start, still dreaming of impossible things.

The Lights Up Festival and associated drama premieres on BBC Radio will be celebrating the breadth and creativity of the theatre industry in the coming weeks, ahead of a return to live performance. While radio plays have long attracted stage actors, they also offers new avenues for writers to try out plays exploring crucial events and experimental approaches. In a strong week for new work which also include William Humble’s two-parter, The Performer, a biographical comedy monologue read by Stephen Fry, The Meaning of Zong and Afterplay showcase the power of audio drama to transport an audience’s imagination and to see the familiar a little differently.

The Meaning of Zong premiered on BBC Radio 3 and Afterplay on BBC Radio 4, both are available via BBC Sounds. Follow this blog on Twitter @culturalcap1 or Facebook Cultural Capital Theatre Blog.

Film Review: On Chesil Beach

Most romantic films end with a marriage, but in reality, marriage is just the beginning of a more complex story. Usually months of planning and excitement go in to creating a memorable wedding day and all the couple’s energy is focused on the perfect venue, dress or cake. But when it’s finally over, the newly conjoined couple are left alone and the actual business of being marriage stretches before them, a series of hurdles which the unprepared could find insurmountable. How much trickier this would have been in the more innocent middle years of the last century when propriety barely allowed a couple to see each other unchaperoned before they said “I do.”

Ian McEwan’s novella On Chesil Beach set in 1962 is the uncomfortable story of the first few hours in Florence and Edward’s married life as they awkwardly attempt to consummate their union. Circling each other nervously in their worn seaside hotel room, the couple recall aspects of their earlier lives including the shaping influence of their family on their current attitudes and personalities, as well as the chance encounter that brought them happily together. These interspersed memories tell of a romantic love story between two people who seemed destined for one another and certain to be happy, but their physical inexperience hangs heavy between them which leads to recrimination and unexpected truths.

Adapting novels for the screen is never easy and McEwan’s stories are particularly problematic because so much of his writing involves characters’ internalized monologues which can be difficult to replicate on screen without the use of clunky narration or too much expositionary dialogue. Unlike his previous hit Atonement in which director Joe Wright created an emotive portrait of love and war, giving life to one of the author’s finer novels, McEwan has written the screenplay for On Chesil Beach himself, ensuring the protagonists and sentiments remain exactly as he originally wrote them. If not always spritely, it makes for a faithful and sensitive transfer to the screen.

Happily, the project is also a movie debut for director Dominic Cooke, who, fresh from his sensational production of Follies at the National Theatre – which was nothing short of a theatrical triumph, earning its own reprise next year as well as multiple awards. Cooke certainly knows a thing or two about commanding stories of uneven love and the emotive power of long-held infatuations. In fact, watching On Chesil Beach at the London Film Festival last year, the parallels with Follies were striking; both stories are about couples who enter into marriage to escape some aspect of their surroundings and undergo a painful process of self-discovery that pulls them to pieces. But, more importantly, the effect of that decision, made on one particular day, can last a lifetime.

What Cooke brings to the project is the ability to infer so much meaning from a series of tiny signals that illuminate the screen, most notably the frequent focus on hands and mirrors as characters are seen holding linking fingers in moments of distress and need, or squeezing a shoulder to comfort and reassure – we know from Brief Encounter that such a seemingly insignificant gesture can be loaded with meaning, as Alec’s hand on Laura’s shoulder painfully explicates their final ever moment together. Cooke, fully aware of the power of such gestures, uses these small movements again and again to both emphasise the repressed physicality between Florence and Edward, as well as the more straightened expectations of the period. And in turn, this bodily restraint between them only seems to heighten the shock of their attempts at sex.

Production designer Suzie Davies creates a stiff 1960s world in the Dorset hotel room in which the couple plan to spend their first night. It’s clearly a respectable place, not quite high-end but not cheap either which suitably reflects the relative wealth of the couple, fancying itself as a place that offers silver service in the rooms while employing a couple of jack-the-lad waiters who find it hilarious. It manages to be fussy yet stale at the same time and you wouldn’t be surprised to see antimacassars on the chairs in the day room, a place that seems stuck in the past at a time when the nation was on the brink of a youthful revolution that seems a world away from the physical and emotional confines of this young couple. It’s spacious yet is a place of suffocating restriction for Florence in particular.

Saoirse Ronan’s sensitive central performance conveys a weight of expectation on Florence Ponting that has followed her through a bluestocking childhood, and later in the crushing atmosphere of the hotel room, forces her to accept the role of willing wife while being anything but. Working across two-time periods, Ronan neatly treads the line between a warmly confident young woman, raised in a staid environment and certain of the violinist talent that will ensure the success of her quartet, while the flush of seemingly easy romance with Edward Mayhew offers her a freedom and emotional connection that will release her from her family.

But, when the film returns to the hotel room, Ronan also shows the degree to which their earlier relationship had been a chaste fantasy, and once faced with the requirement for physical intimacy, she becomes afraid. In the growing awkwardness between the couple, Ronan carefully depicts the evaporation of Florence’s confidence as fear, confusion and revulsion take their place. And while the film is quite democratic in its attempt to create sympathy for both sides, Ronan’s performance of a virginal young woman, very much of her time and lacking in experience, cast into the unknown is an affecting one.

As her new husband, Billy Howle is an equal mix of contradictions, and he, along with Director Cooke, work hard to prevent him seeming callous. To facilitate this Edward’s story focuses around the easy bohemianism of his family, a clear class divide with the Pontings who beneath a veer of politeness imply he is an unsuitable match for their daughter. Howle in the flashback sections is a charming and affectionate boyfriend who has earned an academic future beyond his expectations and sees the world in rather uncomplicated terms.

In addition, his close family deals elegantly with his mother’s condition, and the audience admires how eagerly Edward welcomes Florence into his more relaxed and supportive home. His love for her seems real, not just a physical abstention, and even in the hotel room, as an eager groom his desire to consummate the relationship is never brusque or progressed without her consent. In the aftermath of their evening Howle reveals Edward’s depth of feeling, particularly in recognition of their quite different perspective on the same events, as well as his stinging feelings of betrayal that make their ultimate moment on the beach crucial to the rest of his life.

On Chesil Beach has a wonderful supporting cast including Sam West and Emily Watson as Florence’s cold and snobbish parents exuding disapproval at every turn, and whose behaviour explains Florence’s own marital reticence. There have only ever been rules and silence in their home, without any attempt at physical affection or to equip Florence for the experiences to ahead. Adrian Scarborough and Anne-Marie Duff are equally excellent as Edward’s loving parents, with Duff in particularly giving a small but powerful performance as a woman damaged by a collision with a train door, keeping her “episodes” just the right side of credible. And while they are a more successful family, Cooke suggests the Mayhews too have failed Edward, giving him a sense of romance but, despite the hardship of their lives, he’s guiless when confronted with people whose surface expression conceal their true emotions.

Sean Bobbit’s cinematography is one of the film’s highlights, and whether it be the stormy vision of the strange pebble beach that so fittingly reflects the turmoil of the newlywed’s relationship, or the sun-drenched nostalgia of countryside picnics and cricket matches during their courtship, Bobbit’s work reflects the emotional tenor of the scene. It is a very British film which comes with everything that tag implies including occasional cosiness and lots of repression. There is a deliberate artfulness to the way in which the film has been constructed, that departs from the book somewhat to create a purposeful impression on the audience which at times feels heavy-handed, as though manipulating the audience to change their response to the characters.

While its quietness may divide viewers, it is nonetheless refreshing to see a very different kind of love story depicted on screen, and one that questions the emotional honesty of couples and their preparedness for marriage. On Chesil Beach wonders how a single moment can change and affect the rest of your life, how a rash decision alters who and what you became, extinguishing something that can never be replaced.

On Chesil Beach opens in the UK on the 18^th May. Follow this blog on Twitter @culturalcap1

The Writer – Almeida Theatre

It feels as though we’re living through a golden age for new writing, unsurprising given the heightened political circumstances of the last two years, but this has coincided with a period in which mainstream theatres have been prepared to take greater risk, making space amidst the musicals and classic revivals for a blossoming of new work. The Ferryman may have had all the best new play categories sewn-up in the recent award season, but its fellow nominees – Ink, Oslo and Network –  in any other year would have been equally deserving. And there were plenty of impressive new shows that were overlooked including Anatomy of a Suicide and The Grinning Man.

2018 is proving to be equally rich, and along with The Inheritance which premiered at the Young Vic last month (Part 1 and Part 2 reviews), three new plays have opened in as many weeks in London’s major theatres – Quiz at the Noel Coward Theatre, Instructions for Correct Assembly at the Royal Court, and now Ella Hickson’s The Writer at the Almeida, her much anticipated follow-up to Oil. While all of this writing has been innovative, exciting and engaging, it also set a high bar exposing the weaknesses in less satisfying work.

The creative process is a complex and fascinating thing, but Hickson argues there is a personal cost for those who put something meaningful into the world and, if the artist happens to be a woman, there are also significant obstacles to overcome in a system that favours and empowers men. The Writer reflects our current interest in sexual misconduct and gender inequality to tell the story of a young writer whose early encounter with a sleazy male director and later a passive-aggressive boyfriend affect her work and emotional development. While she actively rejects many of the social expectations placed on women and embarks on what seems a more contented path, she cannot quite escape the expectations of others and her own self-sabotage as reality fails to match the world of fiction she wants to create.

Hickson uses an abstract approach that constantly keeps the audience guessing about the nature of truth and fictionalised versions of it. The Writer opens with a post-show confrontation between an audience member who claims to have left a bag in the auditorium (Lara Rossi) and a member of the crew (Samuel West) who asks her opinion of this hit show and receives a lengthy and impassioned diatribe about theatre reflecting the sullied gaze of the male director who sexualises his female, but not male, actors, patriarchal blocks to the progression of women, the overly middle-class subject matter and attendance at theatres, as well as the desperation of men who marry much younger women. At one point, the nameless audience member astutely remarks that whenever a woman walks on stage we instantly assess her attractiveness and clothes, but when a man walks on we wonder what he’s going to say.

It’s a great scene, uncomfortably long for some as we learn why the conversation becomes increasingly embittered, but Hickson prevents it from being too one-sided, subtly shifting sympathies between the two sides before delivering a knock-out blow. It’s a discussion many women in theatre have longed to have and to see it played out onstage feels significant. With the house lights staying up for the first two scenes on a virtually bare stage, there is no artifice, and the company are eager for us to know that the audience is equally complicit in the prolongation of this aspect of the industry.

And Hickson maintains this energy through the next two scenes. As we discover that what we have just witnessed is part of a play written by another writer about her own experience (played by Romola Garai) the scene dissolves into a Q&A in which the ‘real’ overbearing Director gives her pretentious and patronising notes. This is followed by a deliberately artificial scene in which the audience watches the stage crew construct the set, before the Writer goes home to pressure from her boyfriend to commercialise her work, get married and have children because these are the ‘expected’ measures of a successful life.

Blanche McIntyre takes an alternative approach to staging each new section which comments on the variety of ways in which real life is filtered into different kinds of theatre, making it harder to tell which parts of the play represent reality or its reconstruction, all of which are interesting viewing. The purposeful artifice of the boyfriend scene is particularly effective, not just in drawing attention to the pressure of social expectation and how one couple could have such opposing approaches to the same circumstances, but also emphasising the idea of constant female (and to some extent male) performance in society, expected to dress, look, sound and even think a certain way, and the exhaustion that engenders.

So, by the play’s midpoint, you’re convinced that The Writer is an innovatively envisioned and mind-expanding piece of work that uses the very idea of theatre to explore the pain of female creativity within our socially constructed value system. But then it starts to unravel, with a confused second half that removes the male characters almost completely to focus on the Writer’s journey of self-discovery. It takes her into a more satisfying emotional and sexual connection with another woman but lacks a coherent link with the power of what’s come before.

The tone switches completely and a new form of theatrical presentation is used for the fourth scene as the Writer calls on the style of Greek mythology to offer a third person narrative of her experience of retreat from reality. She finds both love and a sense of calm, told using a bit of physical theatre, complete blackout and swirling video design designed by Zakk Hein. Despite openly acknowledging the scene’s flaws in one of the many meta-theatre references, as the ground shifts from under the audience’s feet, you can actively feel a lot of the room disengaging with the production and no one’s quite sure what this is about any more, Arguably, distancing you from what has come before is exactly the point, Hickson actively wants to push you out and shake your complacency, but its less clear what she wants you to take from this part of the production.

The final section almost exactly mirrors the earlier boyfriend scene, using a similar approach to uncover the Writer’s own relationship with a partner but in new circumstances. Its still artificial but in a much classier and more expensive-looking set which, again, we watch the crew construct before us. However, this time, the purpose is slightly more opaque, and while there’s a connection to the idea of cost referenced earlier, and the difficulty of being with someone who cannot understand the creative process, this scene is rather ponderous. A couple of sex scenes, some silent eating – which admittedly hardly anyone does on stage – and lots of pauses don’t quite do enough to join-up the various bits of the show. It sends the audience away slightly frustrated because The Writer has front-loaded the most powerful sections and left a somewhat diluted ending that will take away from the important point the play is making about women in theatre, as well as, unfortunately, giving others a reason to dismiss it.

The inherent strangeness of the show is one of its strengths, and, as we saw with The Treatment, heightened reality is something that the Almeida is quite adept at presenting. McIntyre directs creatively, not allowing the multiple-staging techniques and Anna Fleischel’s exciting flat-pack set to distract from the central purpose. McIntrye also balances the transition between the layered scenes, offering a clarity to the Russian doll-like distillation of argument as Hickson uses her the fictional Writer played by Garai as her mouthpiece, while she in turn uses her own creation played by Rossi to open the debate.

As the protagonist, Garai presents a woman – if indeed each scene is the same woman – who has endured all the hurts and frustrations the industry can inflict, and while we see a slightly timid person learning to defend herself against these external assaults, its always clear how profoundly the initial encounter with the Director has shaped her. As we know from her other work, the subject matter is something Garai is passionate about and she uses that anger to great effect to rail against other people’s expectations and their failure to recognise her own essential difference. The purpose of the final section is an enigma, but Garai here makes her character less sympathetic, as though the she’s now enjoying a selfish freedom that makes her unable to connect to others.

It’s always a pleasure to watch a Samuel West performance and here he takes on the duel role of the fictional Director in the first scene and the real Writer’s boyfriend. As the former, he has an easy charm, displaying a comfort in his own skin that reflect a certain type of powerful man. During the sparky confrontation that opens the play, his quips and sense of detached amusement almost win you over, and you see why these figures have remained unchallenged for so long. As the boyfriend, he is equally engaging but offers a gentler portrait of a good man, accepting of life’s unglamourous reality and unable to really understand his partner’s creative scruples.

Rossi’s fictional Writer opens the play with a strong performance delivering a credible and heated speech that will resonate, possibly unnervingly, with many in the room. But there is a vulnerability too as Rossi slowly introduces her character’s backstory that gives nuance to what could be an unrelenting force. As the real Director, Michael Gould is initially condescending and dismissive, but in a later scene reveals his own inability to explain his own emotions, to praise someone he admires hinting at the persona he too must project to maintain his status.

The Writer is a show about women, made by women celebrating the creative strength of women which is still all to rare on any stage. But for all its use of technique and intelligent staging, only half the production really delivers its intellectual and political purpose with significant vigour, while the remainder doesn’t quite feel as impactful. This is, and should be, a show that will divide audiences, making tomorrow’s press night a particularly interesting occasion, but while The Writer is pointed social commentary, it also has dramatic flaws that start to put out its own fire.

The Writer is at The Almeida until 26 May and tickets start at £10. Follow this blog on Twitter @culturalcap1    

Present Laughter – National Tour

The opportunity to see old and new forms of theatre side-by-side is one of the things that makes London so interesting. In neighbouring playhouses you can see centuries old versions of Shakespeare or Greek tragedy set in either their traditional or modern era, while right next door can be cutting-edge new writing that in technique and presentation dispenses with all accepted theatrical forms. And debate rages between those who feel the West End is stuffed with ‘safe’ classics that attract an older audience and those objecting to noisy new-fangled pieces designed to entice a new generation to the theatre.

Tried and tested plays are a staple of Britain’s theatre landscape, and are as necessary to the popularity and survival of commercial theatre as new writing. During the interval of Present Laughter making at pit-stop at the Richmond Theatre during its national tour, a fellow audience member described the play itself as ‘terribly out-dated’, and this seemed to me not only as an entirely unfair statement about a play that in our celebrity-obsessed world still strikes a rather pertinent chord, but also as a criticism that is only ever levelled at our poor inter-war playwrights like Coward and Rattigan writing about the upper-middle classes. And the same people who yawn at the ‘dated’ nature of this play also baulked at the ultra-modern update of Faustus by Jamie Lloyd and Branagh’s cinematic Romeo and Juliet, so what can you do?

Whether a production feels stale entirely depends on how relevant its themes are to the way we live now or how innovatively its scenes are reimagined for modern audiences, and actually has far less to do with the language of the play then you might suppose. No one would ever say that Shakespeare was dated, or Chekov (as the fascinating transfer of Platonov, Ivanov and The Seagull have proved at the National Theatre), or even now Arthur Miller (as the searing A View from the Bridge and the recent No Villain showed), yet no one still speaks in the ways their characters do, if they ever did. Coward’s plays may look and sound a million miles from who we are today but, like Jane Austen, they are filled with biting satire and deep reflection on the nature of personality and social interaction. Certainly productions may be overdone or made to feel a little dusty as a recent production of Hay Fever did, but this version of Present Laughter from the Theatre Royal Bath is a sharp, sophisticated and fiercely relevant comment on star players, ego and community.

Garry Essendine is a famous actor who recently turned 40 but is unable to throw off his more insalubrious habits such as seducing devoted young women and promising them eternal affection…until he wakes up the next morning. As the play opens Daphne has spent the night and the ever theatrical Essendine is trying to get rid of her amidst a crowd of callers including his ex-wife, his producer and other fans. As the actor prepares to depart for a six-play tour of Africa, he is bombarded by demanding visitors – from wannabe actresses, star-struck writers and other men’s predatory wives – while his poor secretary tries to keep him on the straight and narrow.

There are very few actors who are worth an hour’s travel but Sam West is certainly one of them and his Garry Essendine is a delightful combination of frustrated petulance and wild self-love, a public figure exhausted by his own image. He complains bitterly that everyone around him is either acting a part or endlessly intriguing, before switching in and out of various romantic characters himself to rid his living room of whoever is in his way, while engaging in numerous affairs. Although the show builds to a farcical conclusion as Essendine balances his multiple women, West brings out the darker side of Garry’s life, producing a physical pang when Daphne describes him as lonely.

And through that we see the character become far more than a light comic lothario and instead West makes him a man constantly surrounded by people but emotionally alone. Suddenly his nightly exploits become more about his own fears and emptiness than a callous disregard for the women he attracts. Yet West balances this perfectly with the role’s humour and while we see so much more to this Essendine than we initially expect, he remains a crotchety, complex and ultimately selfish man caught up in a mess of his own making – a finely nuanced and utterly enjoyable performance.

The people surrounding Garry are equally entertaining, part support network and part parasites of his fame. Downton’s Phyllis Logan as the seen-it-all secretary Monica Reed is particularly effective as she attempts to guide her star-employer through his appointments while raising a cynical eyebrow at his latest conquest. Logan has a nice partnership with Rebecca Johnson as the estranged Mrs Essendine who makes every attempt to keep Garry out of trouble and clean up after him while retaining a best-friend like confidence.

Of the mistresses, Zoe Boyle is excellent as the predatory and unashamed Joanna Lyppiatt, the snooty and arrogant wife of Essendine’s producer Henry. In many ways Boyle’s Joanna is clearly a female-version of Garry, unconcerned by the havoc she wreaks and it seems entirely appropriate that eventually the two of them would connect. But she also clearly has her own drivers to be a recognised part of their set and to get whatever she wants regardless of the consequences. Of the male roles, Patrick Walshe McBride’s Roland Maule, the young writer who connives at a chance to meet his hero, is the only one hitting a false note with a performance that is too broad for Stephen Unwin’s subtler take on this play.

Simon Higlett has created a traditional but beautiful set, dominated by a spiral staircase and a Dorian-Gray-like painting of Essendine which hangs over proceedings on the upper level. It’s an easily missed but pointed statement about the relationship between youth and fame, and the hero’s behaviour has much to do with fears of ageing. Again, some may call Higlett’s approach ‘old-fashioned’ and it would be fascinating to see a stripped-back version of Coward, but rather than just create a pretty vision, a good set should reflect both the themes and characterisation of the play which Higlett’s certainly does, and its tone of showy-chaos gives plenty of additional visual clues about the nature of Essendine and his lifestyle.

So is Present Laughter outdated, well no actually, it has as much to say about the fawning nature of celebrity now as it did in 1939. Our gossip columns are full of Garry Essendines dating a string of younger women and having tantrums aplenty, while messageboards, comments sections and Twitter accounts are full of the Daphnes and Rolands who adore them. Investment in the talent and star-power of one individual certainly hasn’t gone away, and Coward’s mature and wonderful play reminds us that behind the celebrity there is still a complicated human being who wants to be worshipped and left alone, who needs to be managed but thinks they can cope without it, and who both loves and resents the impositions of fame. Traditional though it maybe, Unwin’s production and West’s superb performance finds new resonance in Coward’s writing, and while we may clamour for the new in London, there should still be a place for the old if they’re as charming as this.

Present Laughter is a Theatre Royal Bath production currently on national tour. Having just completed its Richmond Theatre run, it moves to the Theatre Royal Brighton for its final week (8-13 August).

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