Kara Tointon delights as Constant Wife in cosy comedy of manners.
Everyone is ‘terribly, terribly’ in this comfortable reimagining of Somerset Maugham’s comedy of manners from the RSC, which is just as it should be.
Set in the Roaring Twenties, this new version of The Constant Wife, by Laura Wade, remains a period piece, set in an era in which social attitudes to love and marriage were in flux.
Set at a time when the Suffragettes’ campaign was fresh in the collective consciousness, the inequality of the sexes, specifically within the confines of holy matrimony, were beginning to be challenged. Wade’s reimagining of Maugham’s feminist play is a genteel affair with anger, resentment and even a touch of relief, simmering never far from the surface.
At the Festival Theatre, until Saturday 4 April
