Noel Coward, one of Britain’s most popular twentieth-century writers, is most commonly associated with plays set in England, such as Hay Fever, Blithe Spirit and This Happy Breed, as well as with musicals, songs and the tear-jerking film Brief Encounter. Volcano (1956), unpublished during the Master’s lifetime, is set on a fictional island, Samola, and leans heavily on Coward’s real-life observations of friends who stayed with him when he was a tax exile in Jamaica.
From early in the play, we are conscious that expat Adela Shelley’s house is located beside a rumbling volcano, an omen for the volatility and instability that permeates the relationships of the residents and guests on the small island. Our first encounter is with attractive, poised, 44-year-old widow, Adela (Jenny Seagrove) who runs a colonial banana plantation, and the married, philandering Guy Littleton (Jason Durr). Guido (Adela’s affectionate name for Guy) has, to his chagrin, succeeded in capturing only the heart of his hostess; not her ‘fastidious virtue’.
Ellen Danbury (Perdita Avery), a pretty, innocent-looking, blonde friend, arrives from the ‘cold rain’ of London (the weather reference heralding a titter from Oxford’s sunshine-deprived audience) to the ‘eternal summer’ of Samola, and quickly establishes that married females are not immune to the attractions of the opposite sex. She candidly admits that ‘I never find it easy to be intimate with women – probably because I like men so much’. It is the English visitors who are not shy of admitting their lust for seduction while the island’s settled expats, including happily married Grizelda and Robin Craigie (delightfully played by Finty Williams and Robin Sebastian) and Adela, favour fidelity. One wonders if Coward consciously used sexual conquest as a metaphor for the history of colonial conquest on the Caribbean islands.
The anticipated arrival of Guy’s wife, Melissa, does not disappoint. Dawn Steele is a vision in black (a perfect contrast to Ellen, ‘the little thing in white’). Miss Steele makes a huge impact on the play, commanding the attention of the other characters and the audience. This cuckolded woman seems, at this point, far more influential than her husband; her voice, her stance and her looks exude power. Director Roy Marsden delicately underscores her position by creating a tableau of three women (Adela, Melissa and Grizelda) sitting in a triangle, with Melissa holding the strong upstage pinnacle position. We later see the vulnerabilities of this woman emerge as she acknowledges that Guy married her for her money.
Volcano introduces us to some beautiful, upper-class, caddish, cigarette-smoking characters (types we associate with much of Coward’s work) alongside the more ordinary moral human beings. The acting does not disappoint – all characters are well delineated. The set, designed by Simon Scullion, and the lighting and sound effects by Mike Robertson and Mathew Bugg are superb and Trish Wilkinson’s costume hit the perfect note. Would I recommend this production of Volcano as a further introduction to the work of Noel Coward and as suitably distracting entertainment during our damp summer of 2012? On both counts, yes I would!