Peter Viney's Blog

Present Laughter
by Noel Coward

RETROSPECTIVE REVIEW

These retrospective reviews may be added from time to time. I have the programme. I mentioned this production at some length when reviewing the 2016 Bath production. As The Chichester 2018 version appears, I looked back. This will include comments from other online reviews. To us, it was a significant production. It was also “pre-Globe Dromgoole.”

Directed by Domenic Dromgoole
Starring Rik Mayall as Garry Essendine

Bath Theatre Royal
March 2003

I saw Rik Mayall three times on stage: Bottom, The New Statesman and Present Laughter. I recall Present Laughter as the best Noel Coward production I’ve ever seen, with Domenic Dromgoole directing and Mayall as the lead, the silk dressing gown clad famous actor, Garry Essendine. It was the part that Coward wrote for himself, and based on himself. It played in several theatres for a week at a time in 2003.

From the review here of the Bath 2016 production with Samuel West:

Our problem was that we have seen Present Laughter three or four times before, and the Rik Mayall version was indelible. It all rests on the interpretation of Garry. Samuel West played him as real, and in a subtle understated way. He was beleaguered, driven to distraction. Yes, he did all the over-theatrical responses and gestures demanded by the script on cue … his delivery was superb, if a little quiet, but somehow he just didn’t capture the comedy or the flamboyance. It needed to be larger for us, certainly more camp as well as simply theatrical. Years ago, the (great) Chiwetel Ejiofor had a similar problem in Noel Coward’s The Vortex, directed by Michael Grandage at the Donmar Warehouse … he did everything right, but ignored that element of sexual ambiguity that is intrinsic in these Coward central roles. Roland the Playwright adores him … this Garry just looks irritated. Others were trying to remember if he had ever slept with Roland.

In some ways, you realize that Noel Coward and Rik Mayall had the advantage of being “popular stars” rather than, or as well as, highly respected and admired actors, like West. That genuine “I will be recognized in the street” quality that is not simply acting ability, but public profile. Samuel West might be recognized in Bath or Chichester or the South Bank, but not in Hartlepool or Brockenhurst. There is something special about comedians and great comic actors, and part of it is the ability to play the role AND keep your own perceived personality present in the role. Mark Rylance has said that the great Shakespeare clowns would not have been confined by the script, nor to the script. Mayall certainly let his TV characters shine below his version of Garry, because the role was given his edge of wildness and unpredictability. Samuel West acted the script in a rich and highly competent way, but lacked that natural comic edge. If I were casting it tomorrow, I’d be looking for a David Walliams profile, or similar.

We were on a limb in loving it. Other 2003 reviews are fairly negative! Though not all. Examples follow.

JON DI PAOLO: WORCESTER NEWS, Malvern Theatre

His character, that of a talented but monstrously self-centred actor verging on middle age, rebounded off all the others like a pinball, setting off all sorts of lights, bells and whistles and constantly the focus of attention even after dropping out of view.

In an interview beforehand, he said Coward “was born to write this play for me” – a typically Essendine thing to say, demonstrating exactly the outrageous yet somehow endearing egotism with which Mayall suffuses the part.

With a name as big as his in the starring role, Mayall’s fellow cast members were sure to be no slouches, and so they proved. Caroline Harker was excellent as his wife, the model of moneyed deportment, and William Mannering also deserves praise for his turn as deranged obsessive fan Roland Maule.

THE SCOTSMAN, Kings Theatre, Glasgow

For one thing, this is notorious as the most brittle and self-absorbed of all Coward’s comedies. Coward famously wrote it as an ironic autobiographical study of a few fraught weeks in the life of Garry Essendine, a West End matinee idol who – at almost 41 – is still so irresistible to every man, woman and dog in the street that life in his elegant London apartment threatens to descend into a chaotic circus of weeping starlets, circling vamps and suppressed gay law students from Uckfield. It is, in other words, an unashamed star vehicle, for an ego as big as the Ritz. Secondly, the show has fallen into the hands of a star – Rik Mayall – who has no intention of handling it with any restraint. On the contrary, he tackles the role of Coward’s “sacred monster” by simply trebling the levels of monstrosity, self-dramatisation, outrageous campery and general hysteria implied in the script.

\But somehow, as the evening wears on, it develops into a triumph. The high-risk genius of Mayall’s performance is that by storming through the elegant surface of the play, and avoiding any effort at naturalism, it dives straight through to the psychological truth at the core of Present Laughter; the place where we have to acknowledge there’s no human being alive who can’t recognise something of himself – or herself – in Essendine’s rampant egotism, and ruthless search for whatever adoration he can get. And Mayall is supported at every turn by Dominic Dromgoole’s brilliant production, which gives this play the most throrough reworking it can have had since its London premiere 60 years ago, taking Coward’s coy textual hints about Essendine’s bisexual past and yanking them straight onto the physical surface of the performance to produce some of the most outrageous comic body language I’ve ever seen on stage.

And the result, eventually, is hilarious; and not only hilarious, but brave, truthful, and intensely theatrical, a hugely successful ram-raid on a fine, robust play that needed exactly this kind of treatment to open up all its rich comic potential to 21st-century audiences. Mayall grabs the limelight, as he should, being fascinating, irresistible, infantile and astonishingly sexy by turns. But every one of Dromgoole’s 11-strong cast gives him superb support, with Pooky Quesnel outstanding as his devoted secretary, Monica. By the end, the audience at the King’s was cheering Mayall and his co-stars to the echo; not because they had always intended to cheer, but because they had been wooed and won over, in the most dazzling style.

RHODA KOENIG, THE INDEPENDENT, Guildford

With Rik Mayall around, a signed performance is redundant. The intricacies of plot may not be conveyed by his revolving arms and the figure-eights he makes with his head, but there is never any doubt about his emotions. To get across the idea that love causes pain (“There’s something inherently sad about happiness, isn’t there?”), he mimes being toppled by lightning, committing seppuku, and hanging on the old barbed wire. Even without being in love, the man clearly risks doing himself an injury.

This hyper-activity is particularly off-key in Present Laughter, Noël Coward’s 1939 farce about a performer who is always acting, to the point that he confuses not only the other people in his life but himself. Mayall’s pretences, though, wouldn’t fool a baby, and his coarse accent belies his supposed upper-crust charm. Coward, who of course played the part of Garry Essen-dine, man of many dressing gowns, still casts an intimidatingly long shadow, but avoiding his clipped disdain is not in itself a solution.

Nor is reminding the audience of the reality behind Coward’s matinée-idol status: Twitching with fear when his secretary mentions “a rather complicated letter from some Boy Scouts”, and flapping like a gaffed fish when he accidentally puts his hand on another man’s crotch, then falls on top of him, Mayall seems to have suddenly turned into Michael Barrymore.

SALLY VERNON, “ROGUES AND VAGABONDS” March 2003, review of Richmond (positive overall, negative on Mayall)

The character is more Coward than any other he wrote for himself: a selfish, self-aggrandizing, flamboyant and charismatic matinée idol with a penchant for petulance. Skating on the thin ice between ‘real’ and ‘ham’ is Essendine’s forté but not, alas, Mayall’s. I am certainly not advocating that Coward’s plays be served in aspic with clipped accents in the supposed ‘Coward style’ and much can be achieved by shaking things up, but to wrap the playing of such a part around an amalgam of Rick, Richie and Alan B’Stard – all forward thrusts of the hips, pointing fingers at arms’ length and lips spluttering with saliva – destroys much of Coward’s coruscating dialogue, and brings an unnecessarily coarse feel to the evening. The audience laughs at the slapstick elements of Mayall’s performance (they are understandably less sure when he runs his hands overtly over Kim Thomson’s bosom in one of the seduction scenes), but the irony and wit for which Coward has always been famous is too often missing.

This is a shame as there are moments when what lies beneath Mayall’s exuberant physicality gives promise of an interesting, real and ultimately riotous performance of a monstrous character. What we actually get might suit a twenty-first century setting but fits very uneasily into Coward’s 1930s theatre world. This Essendine is too selfish, too self-pitying and only occasionally charming; I doubt any one of his devotées would have remained at his beck and call, let alone nursed a desire to accompany such a man on tour.

Offsetting Mayall’s antics is Caroline Harker’s enchanting performance as Garry’s wife. She is the backbone of this man, and it is in Harker’s Liz, as well as Pooky Quesnel’s Monica and Kim Thomson’s Joanna, that we are treated to the comedy inherent in the script, delivered with delectable timing by Harker and Quesnel in particular. These are the belly laughs for me, not the overdone tantrums and the Bottom posturing.

Gerrard McArthur (Morris) and John Dougall (Henry, husband to Joanna) are similarly able to play the lines with gusto, without resorting to caricature; McArthur as Morris is especially watchable and, whether expressing sorrowful disappointment at the news that his passion for Joanna will end in nothing, or executing a falling roll over the chaise longue, his performance gives rise to ‘much hilarity and mirth’.

William Mannering plays Roland Maule as a stalker so obsessed with his idol that it distorts the shape and movement of his body. Amusing to start with, the latter half of the performance is too mannered and competes with, rather than complements, the general mêlée. Meanwhile, Sally Bretton, best-known as Donna in The Office, gives a charming, not to say touching, performance as Daphne, full of youth’s confidence, in love with her idea of Garry Essendine and duped like so many women by his charm. The performance is the funnier for its basis in truth.

PLAYS BY NÖEL COWARD

• Blithe Spirit by Noël Coward, Bath Theatre Royal 2010 (Alison Steadman)
• Blithe Spirit, by Noël Coward, Bath Theatre Royal 2019 (Jennifer Saunders)
• Blithe Spirit FILM 2021 (Judi Dench)
• Fallen Angels, by Noël Coward, Salisbury Playhouse
• Hay Fever by Noël Coward, Bath Theatre Royal
• Relative Values by Noël Coward, Bath Theatre Royal
• This Happy Breed by Noël Coward, Bath Theatre Royal
• Present Laughter, by  Noël Coward, Bath Theatre Royal, 2003 Rik Mayall (retrospective)
• Present Laughter by Noël Coward, Bath Theatre Royal 2106, Samuel West
• Present Laughter by Noël Coward, Chichester 2018, Rufus Hound
• Present Laughter by Noël Coward, Old Vic 2019, Andrew Scott
• Private Lives by Noël Coward, Nigel Havers Theatre Company, 2021, Chichester
• Noël Coward’s Brief Encounter, by Emma Rice, Salisbury 2023