Writer: Noël Coward
Director: Christopher Luscombe
Noël Coward’s light 1925 comedy of manners, Fallen Angels, with its champagne-soaked portrait of upper-class women bickering about useless husbands and fondly recalling premarital escapades, was genuinely subversive in its day. For modern audiences, that sting has vanished, and Coward without bite is cappuccino without coffee: froth minus substance. Christopher Luscombe’s revival — the first major London outing in a quarter-century — plunges into the bubbles, plays it by the book, and wrings every last drop of humour. Ultimately, your tolerance for the piece, amusing though it often is, will depend on how much pleasure you take in watching two sexually frustrated middle-aged bluebloods get progressively drunk and increasingly feral.
Wealthy Julia (Janie Dee) and her buffoonish golfer husband Fred (Richard Teverson) have an amiable enough marriage marked by “passionless contentment”, for which read affection and comradeship but little in the way of love. Julia’s best friend, Jane (Alexandra Gilbreath), finds herself in a similar situation with her spouse, the reliable dullard Bill (Christopher Hollis). The men, clad by costume designer Fotini Dimou in coordinated plus-fours, checked jackets, and sleeveless sweaters, are heading to Cheltenham for a weekend on the links. ‘You’ll only need the irons there,’ the preternaturally well-informed maid Saunders (Sarah Twomey) advises them.
The women’s weekend, a smouldering cauldron of barely suppressed ennui, is jolted by news that Frenchman Maurice (Graham Vick), dashing, enigmatic, and a former lover to both, plans a visit. “Might he arrive before lunch?” one muses. “He never had the slightest restraint,” replies the other. Torn between terror that past passions will shatter their domestic calm and the secret thrill of reigniting old flames, they decide to flee London. Plot shenanigans see them remain at home, decked out to the nines, for a second act evening of martinis and champagne. Under the weight of jealousy and confessional bickering, the women’s veneer of politeness crumbles. Insults are hurled, shoes are lost, slurs are slurred, and the friendship is threatened. Will one or the other succumb to temptation?
Perhaps the most interesting thing about Fallen Angels is its role as a theatrical template for female double-acts fuelled by booze, vanity, and neurosis. One can track a through line from the piece through Hollywood’s Screwball heroines directly to Eddie and Patsy from Absolutely Fabulous. For curiosity’s sake alone, the Menier Chocolate Factory’s revival is to be welcomed, though it remains a period piece. Indeed, opinions will vary on whether the evening’s events merit a three-act play. The review-night audience skewed heavily towards the senior-citizen end of the demographic, suggesting this is one for longstanding Coward aficionados.
None of this should suggest that creatives and cast do a poor job here. Simon Higlett’s set, a subtle riot of creams, beiges, mahogany and walnut, mashed-up with Rennie Mackintosh rectangles, looks utterly gorgeous. Dimou’s evening dresses are glittering glories. Luscombe’s direction delivers some neatly devised physical comedy, and his transition between acts one and two, offered here in a ballet-infused slice of set decoration by Twomey’s deliciously astringent Saunders, gets its own round of applause. He makes the most of the piece’s double entendres. Jane’s recollection of steamy nights in Pisa, looking up at the leaning tower (a metaphor one supposes for Maurice’s sexual longevity), is a lasciviously comic delight, as is Julia’s near orgasmic writhing to the memory of the Frenchman in a gondola in Venice. It is a puzzle, though, why Luscombe has characters give many of their lines with their backs to one half of the audience.
The relationship between Gilbreath’s increasingly dishevelled Jane and Dee’s acidic Julia is the emotional core of the play. What comes before the Act Two cat fight feels like a protracted build-up, and what comes after is an anticlimactic wind-down. Pitch-perfect timing and technical skill are what you would expect from two fine comic actors, and these two deliver in spades, keeping the drunkenness firmly on the right side of tedium.
This is a fine production of a lightly amusing play, but there is a reason London has not seen a revival of Fallen Angels in 25 years. It is not just that Private Lives and Hay Fever are more solidly bankable (though they are), but that the piece no longer shocks. As a study of female frustration and the ennui of marriage, it lacks bite, leaving the production to rely solely on frothy comedy. It feels like a champagne-infused amuse-bouche, not a main course.
Runs until 21 February 2026
