RELATIVE VALUES Tour to 30 March.

Tour

RELATIVE VALUES
by Noel Coward

Touring to 30 March 2002
Runs 2hr 40min One interval

Review Timothy Ramsden 7 March at Oxford Playhouse

Confident Coward revival with a fine cast.This is post-war Coward, with his whole world, and his playwrighting career, apparently bombed into dereliction. No more the Private Lives glamour, the outsize personalities lording it in an admiring world which stretched down to the patronised artisans of This Happy Breed, his immediate pre-war play.

It gives Relative Values a particular interest, to find the playwright coping with welfare state Britain. Not that rationed austerity is evident in the Marshwood mansion, where decent Moxie is happy knowing her place and her enforced refusal to sew a button on for visiting Lady Cynthia is no protest of new-found proletarian dignity but a cause for laughter – magnificently exploited by Tina Gray's smacked-against-the-buffers astonishment.

She's not in on the act, all aimed at stopping the young Marshwood – Ian Kelly, with a long face poking round the world in suave assurance – entering upon a socially disastrous marriage. This is to Miranda Frayle, who combines the vulgarity of Hollywood stardom (cue news of common herds prowling the grounds for her autograph) with a plebeian origin as Moxie's sister. The honest, humble worker knows her place and her god-bless-her mum did too; in Miranda's self-serving fantasy their mother's depicted as a neglectful drunkard.

No-one could better depict a Countess called Felicity, in an age when taxes and fear of Bolshevik firing-squads made the state – or the Pall Mall clubs – totter, than the serene Susan Hampshire. Maternal manipulation instantly converts to wisdom when fronted by those smiling eyes, its plots voiced in tones flowing with honeyed concern. Here is an actor who assumes aristocratic authority with effortless ease.

All round, it would be hard to imagine a better-cast, more accomplished revival than Joe Harmston's. Simon Green's co-conspirator has an assurance and ease to match Hampshire's, while John Harwood's Admiral avoids relegation to the bit-part, old-buffer school of acting.

Sophie Jerrold invests the maid Alice with individuality, skirting the laughingstock incompetence to which the character could easily dwindle. Most skilfully of all, Ken Bones and Ruth Arnold carry off below stairs' revulsion against even the appearance of social climbing with humour and dignity.

Felicity, Countess of Marshwood: Susan Hampshire
Moxie: Ruth Arnold
Crestwell: Ken Bones
Miranda Frayle: Michelle Gomez
Lady Cynthia Hayling: Tina Gray
The Honourable Peter Ingleton: Simon Green
Admiral Sir John Hayling: JohnHarwood
Alice: Sophie Jerrold
Nigel, Earl of Marshwood: Ian Kelly
Don Lucas: Nigel Whitmey

Director: Joe Harmston
Designer: Tom Rand
Lighting: Robert Bryan
Sound: Joe Wright

Tour: 11-16 March New Victoria Woking, 18-23 March Milton Keynes Theatre, 25-30 March Swan Theatre High Wycombe.

2002-03-28 10:26:12