THE problem with reviewing a wholly-new interpretation of a very familiar play is comparison – what would a new audience make of a play you know, and they don’t?
So it is with the extraordinarily versatile and inventive Tracy-Ann Oberman’s version of Noel Coward’s 1939 play Present Laughter, opening at Bath before an eight-venue UK tour. Directed by Lindsay Posner, it turns the central character from a fading London-based leading man in the 1930s into a female star of light comedy and musicals expatriated in New York in the 1970s. The title of the tour is Noel Coward’s Present Laughter, but Oberman explains in a well-argued programme note how and why she and the director have reworked the original.
Not only is the arch Gary Essendine (a role Coward wrote for himself) transformed into Geri Essendine, darling of Studio 54, friend of royalty and international superstar, but various other characters have changed sex. But not all, just to allow for the different social climate of the new era. And that change, entertaining though it is and glittering though the performances, sometimes brings up an unavoidable hiatus in the story, a moment when you think: “No, that’s not right”.
The plot is the same. The star, who has an established, devoted and dependent team of assistants, is on his/her way to a dreaded but financially essential tour, this time to Australia by plane while the original was to South Africa by ship. On the eve of departure a number of odd fans and potential one-night dalliances arrive at the apartment, declare undying and perfect love, and get the usual Essendine treatment. Gary/Geri slinks out to carry on as usual. The play was another brilliantly witty Cowardian comedy, poking fun at celebrity, class and pervasive moral hypocrisy.
The new look Present Laughter begins as the dourly spiritualist Miss Erikson opens up the curtains to find the delightfully muscular young David (Seb Carrington) looking like something from Hair in Geri’s negligee and pajama pants. He has spent the night. He has lost his apartment key – and that’s the motif for the sexually attractive but imminently disposable fans. Then comes
the hilariously intense Rosina Maule, a law student who has fallen in love with THEATRE in the form of Geri Essendine, and equally convincing as a female as played by Eva Feller.
Geri’s rapacious appetites – for alcohol, men and adulation in equal measure – is familiar to “the Firm”, for whom the incomers are a regular inconvenience. Secretary Monty, in a perfectly waspish performance by James Dreyfus, dispenses wise advice and solace, and Adrian Lukis is the urbane, unruffled and very determined ex-husband Len. The whole delicately-balanced structure of Geri’s life is threatened when her American agent’s new husband, Johannes (Kit Young) tries to throw the Bengal Cat into the doocot. But for all his glamour, gay jaunts and infidelities, he’s no match for Monty and Len, who know that Geri, for all her exasperating faults, must be pampered, protected and projected onwards to the next starring role … as long as it’s not Hedda Gabler!
In the centre of all this chaos is, of course, Geri, and Tracy-Ann Oberman is having a ball with a characterisation that conflates the worst alleged excesses of Merman, Streisand, Collins, Taylor and Minelli. It is a barnstorming performance, as it must be, sometimes capturing the weariness of the star’s situation, instead of the more usual Essendine theatrical ennui.
The show is glittering, noisy and fun, and underlines the perennial fact that stars behave badly because they can. Much of Coward’s stiletto-sharp wit remains intact, sometimes sharpened by the re-gendering.
But for me the question remains …. why?
GP-W
Photographs by Simon Annand