The Guardian, June 7, 1991, by Nicholas de Jongh. 
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Noel Coward's "Point Valaine," rescued from almost 50 years 
of oblivion in Tim Luscombe's sinewy production, is a 
theatrical bolt from the blue. The bright young thing had 
come, in this serious instance, no more to make us laugh - 
or not much. Never before or after did he write about sexual 
politics and of an erotic relationshiop which vaults the 
frontiers of class and rank with such power and such 
conviction.

The critics' reaction - with much contemptuous talk of "ugly 
lust" - must have ensured that the playwright, always hot 
for easy glory, returned to the safer territory of the upper 
middle class comedy of manners and mores.

Set in a hotel on a tiny island off the coast of Trinidad in 
1933, Coward at first prepares us for a familiar account of 
the well heeled English holidaying abroad. Paul Farnsworth's 
stage set, with its verandah, tables and blue and white 
blinds, and Tom Lishman's lush score of sea murmurs, 
tropical bird sound, and gramophone jazz and dance music 
establish a familiar mood of period opulence.

And the first act, since it concentrates upon the holiday 
spirits of braying English ladies, two gay young men and an 
acidulous Maugham-like author, smoothly played by Edward 
Petherbridge, leads you to imagine that Point Valaine is old 
familiar Coward.

But there is something else in the air. Sara Kestleman's 
voluptuous, middle-aged hotel proprietor, Linda Valaine, 
though the signs are faint and well-contained, is erotically 
engaged with Stefan, her taciturn Russian head waiter. And 
her performance insistently suggests a sense of unease 
beneath surface calm.

When a fabled young aviator - a true hero of the 1930s - 
arrives, a form of sexual competition, expressed between the 
lines, begins in which two young gay men (subtly enacted by 
Patrick Pearson and Alexis Deisof [sic]) and the author take 
the crucial parts. However the shy, diffident aviator, whom 
Martin [sic] Wingfield makes a touch too stiff and a mite 
too calm, aspires to Linda.

Yet the scene of her fearful, reluctant surrender to him is 
like a premonition of Tennessee Williams; and when Stefan 
more or less catches her in the aftermath of the act the 
play is suddenly fired with a raw, erotic passion almost 
unknown in English plays of the 1930s.

Coward was, in the term of the times, always "discreet" 
about his homosexuality, but in Point Valaine, you sense 
that it was his sense of being a outsider which helped him 
to impart such sympathetic force to the self-hating Linda 
Valaine, with her desire for a man out of her class, and of 
Stefan, the Russian outcast, who only has status and power 
in the bedroom.

Jack Klaff's amazing performance as Stefan, bowed down and 
spitting with fury, words wrenched out of him in spasms of 
grief, is set against Miss Kestelman's cold and scathing 
renunciation of him.

And in Tim Luscombe's production at the Minerva Studio, 
Chichester, with its romantic atmospherics and its swift 
oscillation between broad, rather misogynistic comedy and 
rampart dramatics, the melodramatic tendencies are always 
controlled. A rare find this. 



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