MATINEE audiences can be tricky – there are some wonderful stories about remarks made by elderly ladies at matinee performances of Waiting for Godot. The principally late-middle-aged audience that filled Bristol Old Vic to watch this beautifully staged 1930s-style production, were definitely not a great asset to the cast, with their muted and slow reactions to the comedy within the dialogue and business.

As a result of this, most of the cast fell into the trap of pushing some of Coward’s brittle witty dialogue along at too brisk a pace, throwing away some classic comedy lines. The exception was Ashley Gerlach’s Victor, giving an excellent portrayal of a pompous armchair clubman, or, as Pepter Lunkuse’s gorgeously-gowned Amanda put it, rugged grander.

Visually, under Tanuja Amarasuriya’s direction, with Amy Jane Cook’s stunning sets and costumes, this production was an ideal setting for this comedy of manners. The first glimpses of the feminism that was to explode after the Second World War were there in some of Amanda’s outbursts, and the male chauvinism which still ruled society in the 30s was equally clear from Chirag Benedict Lobo’s Elyot. His reply to Amanda’s line “You are no gentleman, you struck me”, “Some women should be struck regularly, like gongs”, drew a gasp and the biggest response all afternoon from the audience.

Coward wrapped those ideas and some more subtle digs at 1930s morals and beliefs in a wonderfully constructed story of Elyot and Amanda, divorced, but still in love with each other, meeting on the balconies of their grand French hotel suites where they are about to start their second honeymoons with Sade Malone’s vague unsophisticated Sibyl, mentally far more than seven years Elyot’s junior, and the stolid Victor.

After Elyot and Amanda’s flight to a luxurious Paris flat, the quartet meets up again, and the runaways demonstrate that they may find it difficult to live together, but cannot live without each other. After some beautifully-written comedy business and dialogue, Elyot and Amanda sneak off as Sibyl and Victor show that small-mindedness can be as destructive as brittle sophistication.

Composer and sound designer Timothy X Atack gives Jodie Cuaresma, who also puts in a good shift as the belligerent French maid in the Paris flat, a new in-period solo song as a prologue to the story, but sadly the show does not feature Coward’s “Someday I’ll find you”, that ‘nasty, insistent little tune’ as it is described, which matches the story, dialogue and sophistication of the story to perfection.

GRP