"The Marquise". Oxford Playhouse

Every playwright has their unloved child. Shakespeare has Timon of Athens. Arthur Miller has After the Fall. And Noël Coward has The Marquise. For most of the last century it has lurked in the shadows cast by Private Lives, Hay Fever and Present Laughter, emerging only occasionally to remind audiences that even Coward’s cast-offs are more entertaining than many writers’ masterpieces.

But this production does more than dust off an old family heirloom.

The Marquise, unusually for Coward, is set in the distant past of France 1735. Its characters, all Comtes and Marquis, are (in prior versions) bedecked in wigs, rouge and massive sleeves. All this is so alien for Coward that it’s the setting, rather than the play itself, that has consigned The Marquise to the maestro’s marginalia. Director Philip Wilson has recognised this. He’s seen that the dialogue is every bit as modern, English and risqué as Coward’s better-loved comedies. So he’s transported the play to the 1930s. And, with minor textual tweaks (a horse-drawn carriage becomes a Bugatti), it feels if anything more natural, more approachable, more Cowardian, than Coward himself ever intended. As Le Comte Raoul de Vriaac himself might have commented, ‘Chapeau!’ 

So this charming, seditiously seductive production, dressed in borrowed robes, feels as though it has finally found its true nature. It is on a fittingly genteel tour of hand-picked southern English towns (Windsor, Oxford, Bath, Guildford and Cambridge). I think Coward would have approved.

The plot is, superficially, a comedy of manners about two men, Raoul and Esteban, who want to marry their children off to each other. But the youngsters each love another. And when a mysterious woman, the Marquise Eloise de Kestournel, turns up out of the fathers’ murky pasts, disruption, deceit and denouements ensue. 

It all takes place on a single set, the drawing room of Raoul’s mansion. And at first sight, it would be hard to imagine a more conventional country house comedy. French windows, drinks cabinets, butlers and lockable libraries - they’re all there.

But that’s where the real genius of this production steps in. Director Wilson understands how Noël Coward’s apparently bland settings could provide a kind of camouflage that allowed his words to worm under the mental guards of his hopelessly traditional audiences. Once accepted as a bastion of the Establishment, he could become a cuckoo in the nest of heteronormativity, and start chucking out the eggs. And, as with so many Coward plays, this one subtly paints a picture of a far more permissive, gay-coded society than first appears. 

It simmers with eccentricity. The two old men have a barely concealed affection for each other, and their constant references to past misdeeds that they now regret hint at days of sexual experimentation that they yearn to recapture. (The recurrent phrase ‘It’s the secret of my life’ sounds like Coward himself addressing us directly.) Esteban’s son, Miguel, is (in this version, and, if we’re honest, in the original too) openly gay. And the most romantic moment in the first act is when he promises not to marry his betrothed, Adrienne.

But it’s the appearance of the Marquise herself, played with luscious extravagance by the captivating Juliet Aubrey, that puts the cherry on this lightest of cakes. Like Elvira, the deceased wife in Blithe Spirit, she returns from the dead to remind Raoul and Esteban who they really are. And, like Elvira, her own sexuality poses as many questions as it answers. A few years ago, Alex Foster’s production of Blithe Spirit, at the O’Reilly Theatre, cast a man as Elvira, and that one decision reframed the entire play as a manifesto for gay acceptance. Here, Eloise may well be feminine, but her mannerisms, her exaggerations, her sheer, Frankenfurteresque poutiness, all carry overtones of a drag act. Her very physicality puts the men to shame, and they desire her not just because she’s a woman, but because she represents the experimentation of their youth. Coward could not make openly gay statements in his plays. But he was a master at hiding them in some of his most alluring female roles. 

This of course was the era of Ernst Lubitsch and Rouben Mamoulian. Sex was being hinted at everywhere. The art of the playwright was not to avoid it but to find how delicately and thinly it could be disguised without openly stating it. And Coward sails close to the wind with gorgeously painted sails. This production may not openly challenge societal norms, but it undermines them with cheeky assurance. It’s in good company: there are echoes of Oscar Wilde’s Woman of No Importance in the background; there’s the menage a trois of Lubitsch’s So This Is Paris. And, looking forward in time, there’s more than a dollop of Mamma Mia in the mix. That key decision to uproot the action from 1730s to 1930s exposes what it’s really all about, like moving a sofa to reveal a lost earring.

The Marquise will never be as funny as Coward’s greatest works. But it merits an outing, and this production more than does it justice with its sympathetic and original treatment. It finishes with Eloise and the cast all singing Coward’s beautiful, mournful If Love Were All from the operetta Bitter Sweet. It’s the song that includes that famous line taken as Coward’s modest judgment on his own career, ‘A talent to amuse’. As time goes by, and as the subtext of his plays comes ever more to the fore, that summary looks like a characteristic understatement. Coward certainly did amuse. But as this production shows, he did something else as well: he quietly taught audiences to sympathise with lives they were not yet ready to acknowledge.