The Constant Wife
The Swan Theatre, Stratford upon Avon
★★★

THE audience were clearly delighted at the close of Laura Wade’s treatment of Somerset Maugham’s 1927 comedy of manners. But although I found myself enjoying rereading the play in preparation for this review, frankly, I found the production disappointing.

Maugham’s play is one of his light-weight upper middle class comedies, marked by his characteristic subtle satire and mastery of dramatic form. Its characters and their language are real because he knew them.

Laura Wade claims she wants to “polish up” what she recognises as Maugham’s feminism but in doing so loses his simple but effective relationship with his audience by making what is skilfully revealed into the obvious.

Constance Middleton is the perfect mistress of her elegant home enjoying what seems like the perfect 15-year-long marriage, while her family and friends are determined to make her aware that her wealthy doctor husband is having an affair with her best friend. She astounds them all when she reveals that she has long known of it but has decided that for everyone’s comfort and domestic harmony she would let matters lie. Now out in the open, she controls the situation with remarkable aplomb.

The comedy of the opening arises from her worldly mother’s attempts to stop her younger daughter’s indignant determination to tell her sister. There is a hilarious scene when her friend’s furiously jealous husband turns up. Constance weaves an ingenious false story to get her husband and friend off the hook.

Now in control, having used her design skills to achieve the only true freedom in marriage — economic — she explains that she is off with a long-devoted lover on a holiday romance break in Italy before returning to a new normality.

Laura Wade adds an earlier scene in which Constance discovers her husband and friend in what they used delicately to term flagrante delicto, whereas Maugham keeps her knowledge hidden until the key revelation, not only from the rest of the ensemble but also from the audience. Where Maugham plays off audience reactions, Wade constantly reveals all. There are also constant nudges to remind us that this is how plays work.

Nevertheless, the cast led by Rose Leslie’s attractively assured Constance play for every laugh to be had from these artificial characters, while Tamara Harvey’s direction appears to feel the need to flirt with oddities such as having the cast periodically move in meaningless patterns in silent dance.

There is nothing wrong in trying to modernise a period drama but, as a recent production of Maugham’s The Circle demonstrated, there is much relevant to our contemporary times in his social comedies without having to lose their period quality.

Runs until August 2. Box Office 0789 333-111, rsc.org.uk