STAR QUALITY BY NOEL COWARD
Can anyone make a good play about a really terrible one? If anyone can, surely that would have to be Noel Coward. His short story about 50s thespian life was turned by the master into a play – but one that stayed firmly in his drawer. ‘Star Quality’ was re-discovered by Christopher Luscombe and with some heavy editing turned it into a performable piece around 20 years ago. Now the Combined Actors troupe have dusted it down and given a rare performance at the ADC theatre.
PHOTO: PAUL ASHLEY
Coward of course lived his whole life in, on and behind the theatre. The play is effectively his fly-on-the-wall glimpse into the passions and bitter rivalries of a bickering bunch of luvvies. The curtain opens in the rehearsal room where cast and crew are reading a new play: ‘Dark Heritage’ by a ‘promising playwright’ Bryan Snow. Though constantly described by the director and actors as a brilliant new work, the glimpses we get of it reveal no more than a parody of a classic English upper-crust melodrama. For older readers think Dame Cecila Molestrangler and Binky Huckerback. As for the character of the actors and director, shallow is too deep a word.
If all this sounds promising, sadly it was not. The play lacks structure, nor does it have any characters for whom one may care a jot. Though meant to be a homage to leading ladies, Coward doesn’t show us anything of her supposed on-stage talent, though her offstage wily self-promotion against a patina of ersatz humility is well caught. His ‘playwright’ Snow is frequently described by all as a wunderkind and there is some fun in the way the cast and director are all too keen to re-write his precious text. That said the laughs in this comedy of bad manners are few and far between and the whole thing feels like a period piece. .
What of the production? Jenny Scudamore caught the character of ageing leading lady Lorraine with just the right combination of limelight-seeking bravado and manipulative self-pity. Her star quality has always seen her through but here she is up against a director with an even larger ego and her powers are waning. Rory Lowings offered a powerful reading of the self-assured bully, Roy Malcolm. Madeline Harmer gave a fine turn as Nora, Miss Lorraine’s maid who has seen it all and probably knows more about plays and players than the professionals. You sense that Coward had met a many such Noras.
The first half of the play is set in the rehearsal room a fw weeks before first night. We are introduced to the director, his ASM and the actors. but it’s all rather too pedestrian. We have all the tropes of such backstage life: the late arrivals, the bitching and the upstaging. The plodding script was not helped by a production that seemed at times to lack energy and conviction. The pace was slow and there were too many longeurs between scenes allowing whatever tension that had been built to dissipate.
The second half of the play takes us behind the scenes of a first night performance of Snow’s play. Here the production stepped up several gears and there were some fine moments especially classic Cowardy sparring between director and leading lady. There were also moments where the energy lapsed but this was perhaps understandable as the play is disappointedly weak. Though it was interesting to see this ‘lost’ play by Noel Coward, I’m afraid to say it lacked any star quality.
