Noël Coward’s This Was a Man caused quite a stir when it was first performed in 1926, but that was in New York, because the Lord Chamberlain had refused the play a license in Britain. In 2017 however, where Netflix ‘n’ Chill is an acceptable way to spend many an evening, it seems positively tame and leaves you wondering quite what all the fuss was about.
The small Lounge of The Leicester Square Theatre takes the form of an artist’s studio, with some crude pencil drawings hung from clothes pegs. This is the home of a society painter, Edward, who is wetter than his recently completed canvas. His wife, Carol, is sleeping with at least three other men and Edward could barely care less. However, his best friend Evelyn (it’s a man) is a little more outraged and sets about seducing Carol simply to prove a point, but ends up being the one who gets seduced.
It’s not Cowards best work, as a comedy it fails in its most important duty, with only a few chuckle-worthy moments. The scenes are particularly long and it feels like the whole thing could have been over and done with considerably sooner. Coward’s biggest failing is to focus the action on just three main characters, another three are unceremoniously abandoned after the first scene while the final three have little purpose whatsoever. This is a crying shame as Georgina Ezuanyamike seemed to have great potential but was, alas, never to be seen again. Of the three on which the action was focussed, Tom Pike, as Evelyn, made the greatest impact.
For This Was a Man to be relevant today it would really need some kind of modernisation, and the director, James Paul Taylor, obviously agreed, choosing to set it in modern times. Or did he? It was actually quite difficult to tell as the actors all used some form of received pronunciation, but the costumes were modern-ish. It meant that what we saw and what we heard wasn’t matching and this made it all feel very out of kilter.
In the end, it was lovely to see a Noël Coward play eventually staged in London, after such a long and unnecessary absence, especially as Venture Wolf were brave enough to present the entire script unedited, unlike the 2014 Finborough production. Yet, without keeping faithful to the original period or, completely modernising the play in its entirety, the audience is left feeling rather out of touch with proceedings and the flaws of Coward’s ‘lost’ work all too evident.
