Somerset Maugham’s make-up or break-up play
The Constant Wife Gate Theatre Until August 13 *****
Ninety years after it was first produced, Somerset Maugham’s most enduring play manages at times to show its age and yet often sounds bang up to date. It’s littered with waspish generalities about men and women similar in tone to some of the barbs of Oscar Wilde and Bernard Shaw, and yet it can also be seen as almost militantly feminist.
It raises the question of the relationship between men and women, in particular a married woman’s ability to live an independent economic life, and the thornier question of whether a woman is as entitled to a freewheeling sex life as her husband.
All the conservative friends and relations of Constance are keen to tell her that her husband John is having a fling with her best friend, the married Marie-Louise. But they have underestimated the mentally emancipated Constance. And as for divorce? Well, you shouldn’t underestimate the material advantages of a wealthy marriage. Constance’s glacial lack of emotional involvement is one of the problems with the character. She’s smart, aware, witty and beautiful, but yet so emotionally disengaged that you wonder if she could ever bridge the gap between head and heart.
Tara Egan Langley certainly endows her with plenty of charm and is delightful in the role, but Constance treats even her former devoted wouldbe lover as a useful toy. I can imagine some people being a bit miffed by her description of married women as parasites and worse, along with her remark that Marie-Louise is a terrible liar ‘even for a woman’; the voice of Maugham himself I think.
Simon O’Gorman as John, and Peter Gaynor as Marie-Louise’s cuckolded husband provide most of the comic moments, although the rigidly formal Mrs Culver, Constance’s mother (a perfectly cast Belinda Lang) got the biggest laugh of the evening with her simple definition of how you know if you really love someone.
The second half, in which Constance outlines to John her new attitude to life is much brisker and funnier, mainly because it gives Simon O’Gorman the opportunity to extract every nuance of incredulous reaction from John’s new predicament.
The long first act laboured at first under the exchanges between Constance’s mother, sister Martha, and friend Barbara, spoken in slightly selfconscious cut-glass accents. Nonetheless there are great female roles here with Caoimhe O’Malley particularly good as the flighty Marie-Louise, all of them costumed to perfection and operating in a particularly elegant set.