Sunday Telegraph, June 9, 1991, by John Gross
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Even the presence of the Lunts in the cast could not save 
Noel Coward's "Point Valaine" when it opened on Broadway in 
1935. A London production failed to make it from a fringe 
theatre to the West End 10 years later: Coward himself did 
not think the play was good enough to survive the transfer. 
Now, presumably on the principle that writers are not always 
the best judges of their own work, it is being given another 
airing at the Minerva Studio Theatre, Chichester.

Alas, Coward was right. The play, set on a small island off 
Trinidad, is a thumping melodrama. Linda, who owns the local 
hotel, has been having a furtive affair for years with her 
Russian head-waiter. Then she enjoys a night of true love 
with a mixed-up young English aviator. Everything turns 
sour, and the overwrought waiter leaps to his doom.

Meanwhile holiday-makers chatter on the terrace, and a 
writer named Mortimer Quinn turns his X-ray eyes on people's 
tawdry little secrets - when he's not being clipped and 
cynical, that is. The play is brutal one moment, brittle the 
next: but what is really disconcerting is how perfunctory 
most of it is. The comic scenes in particular have a 
Norfolk-like flatness.

In Tim Luscombe's Chichester production the whole affair 
gets much better acting than it deserves, especially from 
Sara Kestelman as Linda and Edward Petherbridge as Quinn. 
But it still has not got more than curiousity value to 
recommend it.



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