Festival Theatre, Edinburgh
Four stars
Love and marriage initially look like old school domestic bliss in Laura Wade’s reimagining of W. Somerset Maugham’s 1926 play. Beneath the all smiles surface and art deco interior, however, lies an unspoken world of infidelity and deceit. In wronged wife Constance, we also have one of the smartest fictional independent women of her time. As played in Tamara Harvey’s production by a luminescent Kara Tointon, Wade ramps this up considerably in a way that puts Constance’s modernity to the fore. While she defends Tim Delap’s philandering husband, John, in public, she nevertheless turns the tables on him by way of Alex Mugnaioni’s fawning ex suitor Bernard.
We first meet Constance as her mother and sister plan to reveal the discovery of her husband John’s affair with her best friend Marie-Louise, played by Gloria Onitiri. As it turns out in the subsequent flashback, however, Constance knew all along. She just chose to keep it to herself rather than make a scene is all, staying one step ahead of John as they navigate the consequences of falling out of love that drive Constance’s emancipation.
This is true of the play itself, which Maugham scholars will recognise as having taken certain liberties with the original. There are new layers of metaness too, as plans to take Constance up the West End to see a confection called The Constant Wife never quite materialise as much as the double entendres do. Constance’s equally progressive sister Martha, meanwhile, as played by Amy Vicary-Smith, gives a second act recap as if recounted by an old school detective in a whodunit. While Sara Crowe’s mother of the sisters represents a generation of women expected to put up with their husband’s indulgences, here, even Philip Rham’s stoic butler Bentley has a secret life.
Beyond the play’s frothy exterior and Jamie Cullum’s jaunty jazz score in a production first presented by the Royal Shakespeare Company, then, is a complex and thoroughly grown up play. This sees Wade take Maugham’s already daring depiction of extra marital intrigue in 1920s society on a merry dance as she runs with it into the next century and beyond.
The Herald, April 2nd 2026
ends
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