Financial Times, June 7, 1991, by Andrew St. George
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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.



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