Coward’s brave feminist takedown of hypocrisy
Home Chat Finborough Theatre
The tiny Finborough Theatre, above a pub in Earls Court, has made its calling card discovering forgotten plays by great 20th-century dramatists.
Home Chat, a 1927 script by Noël Coward, has not been performed for nearly 90 years. It was not greeted well when it was first produced, and no one has championed it since.
But they ought to have done. Written a year before women were granted the vote, it is a searingly powerful, anti-establishment expression of female individuality. It is, for its time, challenging stuff. The director Martin Parr, who dug it out from obscurity, deserves praise for his tenacity.
Coward, a young firebrand, the John Osborne of his day, skewered the sexual mores of his time.
Janet Ebony (played with mercurial charisma by Zoe Waites) is married to stodgy novelist Paul (Tim Chipping).
On her way back from a trip to France, Janet offers her childhood friend Peter a spare bed in her wagonlit (he’s gallantly given his own cabin to an old lady). But the train is involved in a catastrophic accident. Cue horror back home – from Janet’s husband, mother and mother-in-law – as it is found Janet and Peter were sleeping in the same compartment. Surely there were up to no good.
But they weren’t, and the fallout enables Coward not just to mock the sexual hypocrisies of the day, but also to blast the audience with a portrayal of a woman out of her time, frustrated by society’s petty niceties, ready to take control of her own carnal and intellectual destiny.
Waites gives a masterclass in flippant insouciance and steely self-possession, but Richard Dempsey, all gawky teeth and chinless naughtiness, struggles to convince as Peter (the fault is, admittedly, less the actor’s than Coward’s apprentice script). Polly Adams (the mother-inlaw) and Joanna David (the mother) show the tiniest move can have significance, and the scene-stealer is Robert Hazle as the manservant, who sings jazz-age tunes that make the hair on the back of your neck stand on end. Until Sept 24. Tickets: 0844 847 1652; finboroughtheatre.co.uk