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SEMI-MONDE by Noël Coward
Venue: Lyric
 
14th March - 9th June2001
  Directed by Philip Prowse



Cast
Young Man Dom Wilson
Young Girl Lucy Russell
Tanis Marshall Sophie Ward
Dorothy Price Nichola McAuliffe
Suzanne Fellini Georgina Hale
Mike Craven David Foxxe
Beryl Fletcher Camilla Power
Mrs. Fletcher-Hancox Ellen Sheean
Beverley Ford Ian Price
Cyril Hardacre Benedick Bates
Albert Hennick Derwent Watson
Owen Marshall Simon Dutton
Inez Zulieta Frances Tomelty
Cynthia Gable Freya Dominic
Marion Fawcett Imogen Claire
Jerome Kennedy John Carlisle
Norma Kennedy Beth Cordingly
Julius Levenovitch Stefan Bednarczyk
Farley Granger indisposed
Elise Trent Abdrea Hart
Harry Leftwich Brendan Hooper
George Hudd Tristram Wymark
Freddy Palmer Carsten Hayes
Luke Fellows Paul Albertson
Phyllis Hancox Patti Clare
Edgar Darrell Peter Hampson
Gaston Niall Faber
Pierre Andrew Joseph
Marcel Stephen Scott

Reviews

London Standard: Brian Sewell
This play's the real thing

On a demure Radio 4 quiz show some years ago, I and other players were asked when we would like to have been born and choose a historical character. Among the Charlemagnes and Cleopatras my choice was dull but absolutely true - the year to be 1905 or so and the circumstances such that I could be a young man of independent means able to wander about Europe observing its descent into the Gotterdammerung that struck in 1939, the Hungary of Admiral Horthy, the Romania of the Iron Guard, the Germany of Berlin, Weimar and Nuremberg my bailiwicks. This was not a taste for luxury, but the indulgence of intense curiosity into the willynilliness with which the Continent, having destroyed its economy and ancien regime with one world war, within two decades plunged into another.

Many of those born a century ago went no further than Paris, which between the wars was an intellectual honeypot for American authors who could hardly write and English painters who failed the Royal Academy, with penniless Russian princelings for its gigolos and taxi­drivers. Thither I too last week was transported by a play so convincing in its atmosphere and fragmentary narratives that I expected my mother to appear at any - indeed, almost every - moment from the wings. A play? A plotless play, a seamless sequence of immaculate vignettes that conjured the Twenties into sparkling brittle life, no leaden tale with a beginning and an end, all knots neatly tied, but an ingenious kaleidoscope of subtle insights into the human predicaments of lust and longing, power, wealth and poverty.

I write, of course, not as a drama critic, indeed not even as a man who goes often to the theatre, but who, when he does, wants in some sense to be moved. And I was moved, for this play, Semi-Monde, is an elegy for the lost souls of a brief age long ago. Its writer, Noël Coward, born in 1899, wrote it in 1926, the year of the General Strike, putting himself and his contemporaries in the Ritz Bar (though it could as easily have been the Trocadero or the Cafe Royal in London) under a microscope, not as might an entomologist with moths pinned to a cork mat, but as living creatures that, though capable of escape, are constantly drawn to the flame. It is their singeing that we watch.

Exquisite period piece though it is in this production at the Lyric, Shaftesbury Avenue, alley-cat morality dressed by Worth and Schiaparelli, Semi-Monde is as apposite now as it was when Coward wrote it and himself suppressed it in an age when censorship in England would quite certainly have emasculated it. We have jettisoned the decorum and the manners, but the morality is much the same, the prejudices too. Plus Ca change.

Semi-Monde opens with Nichola McAuliffe as a chanteuse singing a song in which the one word "pleasure” sets the period and style with an extended middle consonant so accurately Twenties, so sensual, languid and luxurious that we know exactly what awaits us: McAuliffe, it must be said, knows how to sing and can project the softest note. Semi-Monde’s music is an extraordinary support to the dialogue, a solitary piano conjuring the White Russian émigré with a phrase from Borodin, the communist with the Volga Boatmen, and, raising the spectre of Fascism with wisps of Wagner, encapsulates the two great transitional powers that were inexorably dividing and consuming Europe - then slips whimsically into Mad About The Boy. This is a serious play, astonishingly percipient of, rather than about our history, a play that tells us in the rapid flash of images how it was in the 1920s, how from the determined pursuit of Carnival came Tragedy.

Semi-Monde maintains throughout a diamond-cut period precision and sustains our pleasure and our pain.

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Noël Coward's 1926 charade of people behaving badly in the Ritz Hotel, Paris, was given its gorgeous world premiere  at the Glasgow Citizens in 1977. This week, the same director, Philip Prowse, performed another miracle. He finds the music in Coward's attenuated writing like no other British director. And he designs the best sets and frocks, full stop. You must, therefore, see  this brilliantly cast and costumed production of a play that is full  of Coward's most explicit depictions of same-sex chat-ups  and put-downs.

That was why, in more censorious times, the play never hit the stage. But it was also expensive, gossamer light and not really a play at all. Here are shadows and outlines of the better known comedies. Prowse's genius is to understand that Coward's staccato lines are a mask to disguise either a contrary meaning or a more painful one. The non-action is confined to the Ritz bar, where knock-out Nichola McAuliffe sings Parisian Pierrot as the Eiffel tower is outlined in lights. Then the great gilded dome of the hotel roof descends, and the characters come and go, bitching and moaning, making assignations. A married couple - played beautifully by Sophie Ward and Simon Dutton - form affairs, respectively, with an older novelist (dry, disillusion, John Carlisle) and his blonde daughter (Beth Cordingley). In a parade of stunning black silks and taffetas, perfect hairstyles and hemlines, jet black jewellery, cloche hats and furs, the parade passes by. Benedick Bates, Georgina Hale and Camilla Power also shine, with David Foxxe stomping around as a jealous husband looking like Bismarck played by Eric Von Stroheim.

It is a magical evening, the most exquisite and daringly unexpected venture on Shaftesbury Avenue in many moons.

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But on the other hand………

Charles Spencer: Daily Telegraph
The unbearable lightness of these silly beings

Watching Noel Coward's Semi-Monde is like being stuck at some hellish cocktail party with a vast crowd of people you don't know and couldn't give a damn about. Although written in 1926, the play has had to wait until now for its London premiere. One can only salute the insane courage of the producer, Thelma Holt, for with a cast of almost 30 the show must cost a fortune. But after two hours of cocktails and forced laughter, what comes after? The gloomy, hungover feeling that you've wasted yet another evening in the theatre when you could have been doing something far more enjoyable - the washing up, for instance.

Coward never really expected the piece to be staged, for in his portrait of rich white trash wasting their time - and ours - in the circular bar of the Paris Ritz, he includes characters with what he described as "abnormalities". There are squabbling lesbians, bitchy old queens, young and not-so-young men and women on the make, wife-swappers, and even a near fatal shooting. All of which makes the play sound like hot stuff. Unfortunately, the characters are so lightly sketched, the dialogue so tiresomely jagged with sophistication, that it is impossible to give a hoot about any of them, even when you've finally worked out who they are and whom they're screwing. "People are amusing, aren't they, to watch," observes a bored young wife, a remark that found me furiously muttering back: "Not here they're not."

Nor can Coward, the suburban, hard-working middle-class boy who was simultaneously dazzled and repelled by the antics of the rich, resist drawing a typically novelettish moral. "We're all silly animals, gratifying our own beastly desires, covering them with a veneer of decency and good behaviour," observes a weary novelist. "Lies, lies, complete rottenness" Strange, isn't it, how the allegedly sophisticated so often turn sentimental.

The play is directed and designed by Philip Prowse and has his distinctive fingerprints all over it - a showy black-and-gold design, stylish costumes, lashings of poisonous camp and an acting style that veers between the brittle and the downright wooden. Prowse's productions always look good, but they also often betray a worrying incompetence. It is absurd in a play as insubstantial as this to have two intervals - the piece would make far more impact if it ran uninterrupted for 90 minutes. And, considering its subject matter, the show is eerily devoid of sexual chemistry, offering absolutely no bang for your bucks.

Yet Prowse has one final trick up his sleeve. Although the action is set between 1924-26, it suddenly moves forward in the final scene to the eve of the Second World War. Hitler is on the radio, Nazi leaflets drop from the flies and former gay-gigolo-turned-straight-husband marches off to do his duty for Britain in RAF uniform. The device lends this trite, frivolous play a resonance it has done nothing to earn.

Among the vast cast flashing before our bewildered gaze are Nichola McAuliffe, who finds real wit in unpromising lines and sings a few Coward songs with style; John Carlisle as the disillusioned, moral-pointing writer; Benedick Bates as the homo turned hetero; Sophie Ward as a bored wife in a see-through blouse, and Frances Tomelty as an odious, hysterical lesbian. Their presence in such a dramatic dud speaks volumes for Holt's celebrated powers of persuasion, but I fear that Semi-Monde won't be detaining them for long.

[Host's note: In the event, the short run originally planned was extended and the play ran for three months]

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And the best, and worst, of the rest ...

SHERIDAN MORLEY for TELEXTEXT says, “ The production is a masterpiece of stage-management.” SUSANNAH CLAPP for THE GUARDIAN says, “It tinkles continually with beady phrases. It's an enjoyable crash course in Coward.” NICHOLAS DE JONGH for THE EVENING STANDARD says, “Semi-Monde fascinates as an experimental comedy that captures with scathing conviction the 1920s upper-middle classes in the grip of pleasure-fever. JONATHAN MYERSON for THE INDEPENDENT says, “One of the most boring, uninviting and unintriguing plays I have ever endured.” PETER HEPPLE for THE STAGE says, "Thin plot mars overdue debut." And goes on to say, "How tame it seems today, and how silly." BENEDICT NIGHTINGALE for The TIMES says, “The glamour of Noël Coward’s Semi-Monde doesn’t dazzle.” JANE EDWARDES for TIME OUT says, "It's hard to feel either shaken or stirred."