Independent, June 9, 1991, by Irving Wardle.
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Nobody, including the author, has ever had a good word to 
say for Noel Coward's "Point Valaine," now returning for 
only the second time since 1935. The Chichester director is 
Tim Luscombe, who successfully reclaimed Coward's equally 
forgotten "Easy Virtue"; and for the first half of the show, 
he seemed to have struck gold again. A savage native dance: 
then the sound of plodding footsteps as the English 
holidaymakers assemble for breakfast in a Caribbean island 
hotel. The contrast is further intensified by the secretive 
figures of the hotel owner and her Russian head-waiter - 
both transmitting a high-voltage charge through the icy 
formality of Sara Kestelman and Jack Klaff. Their secret is 
probed by Edward Petherbridge, sweetly aloof in the role of 
a Somerset Maugham-like observer.

But the spirit that really haunts this edgy, bitching 
household, with its contrast between transient oafs and 
knowing prisoners, between the hotel pool and the shark-
infested sea, is that of the as yet unknown Tennessee 
Williams. "Make voyages," Williams advised: Coward, alas, 
winds up hugging the side of the pool with a wimpish love 
story that drowns under its own weight of cliches. Even so, 
Coward collectors will be well rewarded. 



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