Theatre review: The Constant Wife

Based on a W. Somerset Maugham play that's one year shy of celebrating its centenary, Laura Wade's The Constant Wife gives us a fun but complicated twist on the new, liberated women of the 1920s. Constance (understudy Jess Nesling*) has been married for 15 years, and remains perfectly happy with her husband. But John (Luke Norris) has been having an affair with her best friend Marie-Louise (Emma McDonald) for some time, something everyone but her seems to know about. Her mother Mrs Culver (Kate Burton) and sister Martha (Amy Morgan) disagree over whether to tell her, but things come to a head when Marie-Louise's husband Mortimer (Daniel Millar) finds out about the affair and confronts them. At which point Constance bends over backwards to disprove the truth, not because she doesn't believe it but because she knows all about it and wants to keep the lie going.

It turns out Constance found out about the affair a year earlier, but after the initial shock used it to her advantage: Using John's frequent absences to join Martha in setting up an interior design company, as well as to meet with old flame Bernard Kersal† (Raj Bajaj) for regular theatre trips.

Only her gay butler Bentley (Mark Meadows) was in on her secret, and now it's out she has to find all-new ways of making the situation suit her. You can see why Maugham's story would be an interesting subject for Wade to play with, and while I don't know the original so can't say how much this deviates from it, it strikes a nice balance between a 1920s brand of witty repartee and a more complex 21st-century way of seeing Constance's character: Every time it seems like she's disappointingly chosen the role of doormat to a cheating husband, there's a little twist to show how she's really turning events to her advantage.

But Tamara Harvey's production also works straightforwardly as a borderline-farcical comedy of manners, full of funny lines and a constant reversal of roles that ends up with both John and Marie-Louise asking Constance to gently let the other down in ending the affair. Anna Fleischle's set uses its heroine's job as an excuse to create a stylish Art Deco look that rolls back into its own blueprint when we get a flashback sequence, while Jamie Cullum's music further sets the Jazz Age scene.

Though not as metatextual as The Watsons, The Constant Wife does also give Wade a chance to play around with form and include some fun little winks at the audience: The play Constance and Bernard have to miss is, presumably Maugham's original version of, The Constant Wife, and in a scene-stealing moment Morgan gets to hang a lantern on the storytelling devices used to provide a recap at the top of the second act. This is a fun comedy that works well enough on its own terms, but with enough of an edge to make it well worth reinventing for a modern audience.

The Constant Wife by Laura Wade, based on the play by W. Somerset Maugham, is booking until the 2nd of August at the Swan Theatre, Stratford-upon-Avon.

Running time: 2 hours 30 minutes including interval‡.

Photo credit: Johan Persson.

*Rose Leslie was unavailable, having been urgently called back home because her husband had a form to fill in, and needed help with the "name" field

†most famous for being where Dominic Cummings went for an eye test

‡having got rid of the annoying "x plus interval" format of the Greg'n'Tony years, the RSC's published running times reverted to the more sensible "x including interval" format during Erica Whyman's interregnum period, but the Tamaniel (Danmara?) regime now seems to have gone for the worst-of-both-worlds option of "x with an interval." FOR SHAME.