Since taking over the artistic direction of the Royal Shakespeare Company in 2023, Daniel Evans and Tamara Harvey have brought a new playfulness to the job. Rather than being weighed down with the responsibility of it all, they behave like unusually gifted children who have been given the keys to the biggest dressing-up box in the world. They’re having a lot of fun. And one of the games they’ve enjoyed the most is reframing classic plays for modern audiences. With The Constant Wife they’ve dug up a dusty old Somerset Maugham tome from the archives and, with a sprinkling of adaptation from Laura Wade, revealed it as a theatrical gem, with a female central role directly descended from Shakespeare’s Beatrice.
Maugham is usually seen as one of those stalwarts of the English stage, who plied the pre-war years with drawing-rooms, drinks tables and upper-class tiffs. Like Rattigan, Priestley, Barrie and Galsworthy, he was blown away during the cultural revolution of the 1960s, and, like them, he’s been making his way back into the public consciousness ever since – as he should, because he’s a great playwright. At one stage, in 1910, he had four plays on in the West End simultaneously. Punch even made a cartoon of Shakespeare’s ghost looking distinctly miffed at Maugham’s ubiquity.
The Constant Wife premiered in 1926, and – with Laura Wade’s authorial assistance and Tamara Harvey’s pacey direction – feels as fresh as when Ethel Barrymore created the role in Ohio (of all places) a hundred years ago. It tells the tale of Constance, whose husband John is having an affair with her best friend Marie-Louise. Constance’s mother and sister have found out about John’s shenanigans and plan to reveal all to Constance. But it turns out that Constance has known about it for a whole year, and decided to turn a blind eye because she likes her marital arrangements just as they are. The wronged woman, in Maugham’s play, becomes a woman of power and agency, and the denouement (which shall remain unspoiled) confirms her new-found strength.
But what exactly has Laura Wade done to Maugham’s initial text? And what difference does it make? The original was seen as witty and droll with a soupcon of progressiveness for its depiction of female independence and marital role-reversal. Does CW 2.0 add anything meaningful?
It does.
For a start, Wade has raised the level of Constance’s self-determination. The 1920s may have been an era of burgeoning female emancipation, with suffrage and jobs bringing new possibilities of sexual equality into distant view. But progress was not great by today’s standards. Maugham has Constance say, ‘The important thing is economic independence’, but Wade lifts her to declare with pride and power, ‘It is mine! It is mine! It is mine!’ to applause from the audience. Where the original was whimsical, this is passionate.
Secondly, Wade has introduced some of her trademark theatrical style. There is a welcome patina of self-mocking meta-drama, as Constance and her friend Bernard are heading off to the theatre to see, of all things, The Constant Wife. And the second half opens with an ovation-inducing routine as Constance’s sister Martha comments on how useful it would be if characters in plays spent the first five minutes after the interval recapping the plot – which she elegantly proceeds to do.
Wade also adds a brilliantly judged flashback scene, in which we see Constance discover her husband and friend in flagrante delicto, but decides to keep it to herself. Wade loves sending her heroines back in time. It’s a way for them to possess the past so they can understand and control their own future. In The Watsons she used it to bring the author of the play into contact with the dramatis personae of Jane Austen’s novel. By controlling time, she – and her female protagonists – take control of the narrative. If J.B. Priestley did it to defeat class, Wade does it to defeat the patriarchy.
And thirdly, Wade’s script confers a general brightening to Maugham, like polishing up an old trophy. Lines are shorter, gags are tighter, a couple of minor characters are combined. It’s not a reinterpretation. It brings the past into the present, not unlike what Peter Jackson did with World War One film footage in his astonishing documentary They Shall Not Grow Old: the same people are there, but they’re clearer and more colourful.
In Stratford, the central role of Constance was played by Rose Leslie. For the tour, Kara Tointon leads an impressively energetic and comedically aware cast, who all deliver tart one-liners (‘I’ll be as quick as I can but longer than you’d like’) with pace and aplomb. Constance is a copper-bottomed Great Role, and Tointon brings all the insouciance, wit, intelligence, outward meekness and inner strength that the part calls for. She is backed up by performances from Sara Crowe as Constance’s mother (when did Sara Crowe turn into an old lady?), Amy Vicary-Smith as her sister Martha and Gloria Onitiri as the vacuous, fickle Marie-Louise – all of whom hit all the comic notes at all the right times.
Impressively, and maybe inspired by the play’s theme, virtually the entire production crew is also staffed by women, from set designer Anna Fleischle to deputy stage manager Kelly Evans (although the wardrobe manager – normally a role reserved for a junior female – is a solitary bloke called Rod).
In the Swan Theatre in Stratford-upon-Avon, The Constant Wife must have been transporting. The set, which is deceptively conventional, would have looked daringly unusual on the stage there, thrust entirely into the audience. And the music, with live musicians, must have had a party atmosphere that carried the on-stage piano tinkling into a soundtrack that flowed with the action. At the Oxford Playhouse, with its immutable proscenium arch and empty orchestra pit, the limitations of a touring production are a bit more exposed. The set, while still beautiful, is forced to look flat and two-dimensional, and the music, over-amplified and pre-recorded, feels tacked on rather than integrated.
But other production elements, such as Fleischle and Cat Fuller’s gorgeous costumes, still look stunningly bold. The frocks are frankly to die for, especially one of Constance’s, which has a motif of self-imposed chains. It’s stylish, sassy and daring, and it reminds you that, for all her economic independence, Constance’s lot, like that of the wonderful butler Bentley (Philip Rham) is to be in thrall to her husband.
Maugham wrote at least 30 plays, most of which reside in the darker corners of our less-visited second-hand bookshops. If The Constant Wife is anything to go by, more riches await.
