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.
, the first half of the double bill, shows an attempted reconciliation between the wife and mistress of a successful publisher., 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 , and —end with characters stealthily tiptoeing out of a room to escape a catastrophic or embarrassing situation.
