Noel Coward's comedy is almost 100 years old, one of his first successes as the 25-year-old playwright used a personal experience of a weekend away staying with the artistic family of the actress Laurette Taylor and turned it into a play that has been a delight to actors and audiences ever since. Like all of his best-known plays ("Private Lives", "Present Laughter", "Blithe Spirit"), it's a comedy about egomaniacs crashing into each other and their not-so-egomaniacal victims, as all four members of the Bliss family invite a guest down to the weekend, only to seduce, ignore, abuse and terrify each of them in turn.
Joel Horwood has managed to turn the tight little venue of the ACT Hub into a grand country manor by reconfiguring the stage into a thrusting wedge, with the normally-concealed backstage area opened out into a grand upstairs landing, the deployment of a few indoor plants and the right amount of classy draping and delicate props. He plays it carefully in period while doing a few light polishes on the script (at least one racially-dodgy joke is missing, and there's three gender-reversals in the cast, pushing Coward out of the pretense of a closet he was writing in during his era). There's a delight in letting his cast get deeper into their personas, whether it be floridly artistic, dryly sarcastic, lustful vamp, hearty-sporty-type or dimwitted himbo, and there's pleasure in exploring every possibility of the script to its limit.
Andrea Close leads the cast as Judith Bliss, semi-retired actress who treats the world as her own personal melodrama stage - you can spot her in odd moments trialling different faces for reactions, ways of being fascinating and alluring. She's bewitching, enthralling, an emotional steamroller who could conquer the world if she wasn't so easily distracted, and she seizes any moment she's on stage with relish and power. It's a blessing to see her disappearing deeper and deeper into Judith's delightfully deluded persona, thinking she's charming her way out of everything while completely unaware how terrified her guests really are of her. Matching her in the family are Holly Ross as Sorel, the one member of the family who occasionally reflects on how brutal her family are being to the guests, but mostly as a moral weapon to wield against the rest of her family, not because she really seems to believe anything they're doing is particularly immoral so much as that she likes to scold the rest of her clan. Ross performs with a pitch pefect cut-glass accent which makes her an endearingly cunning fox, surprising us constantly. Steph Roberts plays other-mother Frances, the grumpy author who enters like an angry Zeus to interrogate her family, only to prove just as happy to tease the guests when required. Glenn Brighetti is the mercurial brother Simon, apt to turn from amorous to dismissive in a second, only to switch back again whenever the attention on him may be wandering.
As the guest, Tracy Noble's Myra is the one theoretically most equipped to take on the Bliss', and therefore the one most thoroughly steamrollered by seduction and selective outrage - constantly thrown off-centre by the family. Joe Dinn gives his stiff-upper-lip a very thorough stretching as the constantly-trying-to-be-diplomatic-and-failing Richard, letting us see how far out of his comfort zone he really is. Meaghan Stewart brings gleeful heartiness to the role of athletic Sandy, constantly attempting to be a good team-player even as the rule of the game shift constantly around her. And Robbie Haltiner gives the dim himbo Jackie an endearing sweetness eveh as it's clear he doesn't really get what's going on around him and is vaguely upset by all of it. Alice Ferguson steals scenes wholesale as the annoyed-but-enjoying-getting-a-chance-to-be-annoyed maid Clara.
The cast are bedecked in gorgeous Fiona Leach and Tanya Taylor outfits, sharp and sophisticated as appropriate. The play survives a century after its premiere because outsized egos and powerful pretension has never gone out of style, and because it's the kind of play that rewards the cast getting deeper and deeper into character - the more actressy Judith is, the heartier Sandy is, the more diplomatic Richard is, the funnier the play is. In all, this production is a delight, springtime on stage a whole month earlier than usual.
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