Coward on a mission

A revival of Noël Coward's final work reminds one of the emotional depth behind the laughs

- Michael Billington

MY favourite London theatre right now is the Orange Tree in Richmond. It seats 180 in the round and puts on first-rate plays with tip-top casts. Already this season it has given us Goldsmith and Chekhov and now comes a genuine event: a rare revival of Noël Coward's final work, Suite In Three Keys, comprising a double bill and a full-length play all set in a Swiss hotel on the shore of Lake Geneva. Seeing the whole lot in one day, you come out admiring Coward for an unexpected quality: his emotional depth.

Shadows of the Evening, the first half of the double bill, shows an attempted reconciliation between the wife and mistress of a successful publisher. It sounds like a standard adultery comedy, but the play's real subject is the publisher's impending death. What moves one is Coward's assertion of the primacy of life in the face of mortality. The second play, Come Into the Garden, Maud, is much lighter and funnier. It shows a rich American deserting his domineering wife to run off with a Sicilian princess. Stephen Boxer and Tara Fitzgerald play the big scene between the two fugitives with erotic finesse and Emma Fielding is suitably monstrous as the snobbish wife. What hit me, however, was how often Coward's plays think back to Hay Fever, Private Lives and Blithe Spirit-end with characters stealthily tiptoeing out of a room to escape a catastrophic or embarrassing situation.

However, it is the full-length play, A Song at Twilight, that reminds us that behind Coward the boulevard entertainer lay a man with a mission. In the old days, it was often to assert the value of self-discipline or the virtues of the Empire. In this final play, he enters a touching plea for sexual tolerance and emotional honesty. What we see is a world-famous novelist, who is clearly based on Somerset Maugham, forced to confront his homosexuality.