Financial Times, June 7, 1991, by Andrew St. George ----------------------------------------------------------- The Chichester festival continues at the Minerva Studio with Noel Coward's deservedly little-known "Point Valaine." Coward wrote this dud in the high period between "Hay Fever" and "Present Laughter"; he must be laughing now at any attempt to revive it beyond its 1934 Boston first night. All that can be said for it is that its darker moments made possible the shades of "Shadow Play" in 1935. Here at Chichester, it is redeemed only by good acting from the principals. The plot barely exists. Linda Valaine is the ageing proprietor of a shabby-genteel Trinidadian hotel. She has been having an (improbable) affair with her head waiter Stefan, a melancholic Russian accordionist prone to drink. Her chance of real romance arrives in the form of Martin, a stranded airman; they have a night of tawdry passion, and the Russian throws himself to the sharks in despair. The expected cast of shrill virgins and crusty expatriates looks on. The requisite cynically detached writer on leave from himself is called Mortimer Quinn. The play stumbles across two serious issues in its depiction of colonial malaise. First, the nostalgia of the English abroad ("They sit on the verandah and talk very sentimentally about grey skies, and fog, and Piccadilly"), and second the case of the older woman and the younger man, a daring topic for the 1930s. Both have offered much to expatriate writers like Greene or Durrell; but Coward never makes these issues count dramatically. However, the play occasionally promises to turn itself into something much finer, as if a version of "The Night of the Iguana" (Tennessee Williams) waited somewhere in the heat and tedium. In shaping the background for sex and suicide in the sand, Coward's problem in "Point Valaine" is how to make boredom dramatically appealing. Beckett and Pinter manage it by saying too little; Coward falls short here by prattling too much. The dressing-gown culture which fills in between the late breakfast and the early cocktail simply finds none of Coward's usual helps to hand. He may have taken sophistication out of the ice-box and put it on the hob, but "Point Valaine" leaves his characters starved of subject matter. Nonetheless, the actors cope well. Edward Petherbridge as the writer Quinn moves from wooden to polished; Sara Kestelman (Valaine) is sexy and stern; everything that Peter Wingfield's fine young airman might conceivably fall for, and all that her lover Stefan, powerfully played by Jack Klaff, might turn against. Other highlights include Jane Montgomery as a journalist trying to tackle the recalcitrant Quinn, and Miranda Kingsley's put-upon spinster desperately seeking iron jelloids. The 1930s set, all crisp linen and slingbacks and tea on the verandah, works well with Tom Lishman's tropical soundtrack to make the theatre seem hot. And it is good to see Tim Luscombe working again after his recent outing with the English Shakespeare Company; he has fashioned himself into a Coward specialist. I hope that it is his hand which holds this production back from the brink of melodrama. ----------------------------------------------------------- Bentley's Bedlam http://www.BetsyDa.com/bedlam.html This website is for information and entertainment purposes only and is not intended to infringe on copyrights held by others.