Sunday Times, June 9, 1991, by John Peter.
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On the other hand, you might never guess wrote Noel Coward's 
"Point Valaine" (Minerva, Chichester) if someone took you 
into the theatre blindfolded: with its early 1930s Caribbean 
setting, its polished and thoughtful air and fits of expert 
sentimentality, it comes across like something by Somerset 
Maugham with a touch of the Rattigans. You might think that 
you were in for a set of variations on the vagaries of 
tropical weather and English behavior. Coward himself never 
really liked the play he thought it lacked both the depth 
for tragedy and the polish for comedy. Really? I rather 
think the Master was piqued that the play's American 
reception was less than rapturous, and went looking for 
reasons.

Edward Petherbridge plays a novelist on holiday: cautious, 
immaculate, witty, cynical, remote, a man who is all 
protective shell. Sara Kestelman ows the hotel: a widow, 
brisk, efficient, apparently self-contained, but with a 
shell that is all too easily broken through. These are two 
flawless performances: feeling and irony, cool style and a 
piercing immediacy are kept in tense balance. There is an 
icily funny scene when an eager young girl reporter tries to 
interview the novelist and ends up being lethally 
interviewed herself. It demonstrates how necessary the 
control of others is to such people, both as a professional 
tool and a means of self-defence. You notice, too, that 
everyone else is a in a control-rebellion relationship: the 
athletic young homosexual couple, the ghastly mother and her 
allegedly invalid daughter.

This is Coward's theme, and he dissects it with a mixture of 
frivolity, hard-edged comedy and, alas, a streak of grisly 
melodrama which I must say nearly sinks the play. Coward 
never found it easy to express deep feelng except through 
melodrama or sentimentality, but Tim Luscombe's direction 
has the kind of expert control which never quite lets things 
get out of hand. For this relief much thanks. The social 
comedy is spotlessly done; the manners, the clothes, the 
hair-styles are spot-on (designer: Paul Farnsworth), and the 
whole thing breathes an air of sophistication, devious wit 
and melancholy expertise. 



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