Review: Present Laughter, a hilarious night out with a brilliant star performance

Noël Coward wrote many excellent plays – as well as a fair amount of less-than-excellent ones – but few are revived as often as his 1939 masterpiece Present Laughter. It isn’t at all hard to see why. Coward created the egotistical and spoilt character of a forty-something leading man, Garry Essendine, as a self-portrait, to wittily lacerating effect, and in the process created one of the great roles of twentieth-century theatre. Countless leading men have tackled the part, some with enormous distinction and others with less flair. Now Matthew Warchus, the Old Vic’s artistic director, is staging it, complete with man-of-the-moment Andrew Scott as Essendine.

It helps that his recent casting as “the hot priest” in the second series of Fleabag has given Scott a pin-up quotient that will not have hurt the play’s box office success at all; the Old Vic was thronged with a mostly female audience, all of whom were vocal in their laughter and appreciation of their hero. This is entirely justified. Scott tackles the role with the utmost seriousness, appropriately enough, and from his first entrance, in which he is still wearing an eyepatch and a pirate costume from the previous night’s debauch, he excels in the role. As Essendine finds himself negotiating the whims of a new admirer, an obsessed fan, his no-nonsense secretary, his soon-to-be-ex-wife and a friend’s husband, the farcical antics are juxtaposed with an unusual amount of introspection and poignancy. It is not for nothing that Scott played an antic Hamlet at the Almeida a couple of years ago, to enormous acclaim; there is a similar intensity and breadth to his performance here, allowing him to pull off an unusually sensitive interpretation of the character. He is the very model of a modern flouncy thespian.

He is also extraordinarily funny, as is Warchus’s staging. Coward’s dialogue contains many of his most treasurable one-liners (“Here’s your sordid little comb”, and “No power, human or divine, would induce me to go to Africa with Beryl Willard” are two of the best) and Scott nails every single laugh. There are long stretches where the actors had to pause because the audience had become so giddy with mirth; no wonder it overran by a quarter of an hour. Part of the appeal of Essendine, if he is played as well as this, is that he is a scene-stealing cameo dragged centre stage over the glorious duration of the play. It can only be expected that Scott will win every award going for this performance, and he deserves all of them. This is the definitive interpretation of the role, and will remain so for the foreseeable future.

Elsewhere, Warchus has made the interesting choice to gender-switch a couple of the roles, so Essendine’s bisexuality is made explicit. Enzo Cilenti, as the predatory Joe Lyppiatt, is smoothly charismatic, if hamstrung by a variable accent, but the real joy here is in the succession of cameos and “turns”. Sophie Thompson, as Essendine’s long-suffering secretary Monica, offers warmth and wit in equal measure, and Indira Varma is an unusually grounded and naturalistic Liz Essendine; her final scene with Garry, so often rushed through as part of a happy ending, is given unusual depth and melancholy here. Yet the show is stolen, insofar as it could be, by Luke Thallon as Roland Maule, a young would-be playwright from Uckfield who becomes obsessed by Essendine. Thallon has remarkable comic timing, elevating what is often a stooge role into something hilarious. The audience applauded his big declaration of infatuation; apart from Scott, it’s the funniest thing on stage all night.

Rob Howell’s stage and costume design perfectly conveys the bohemian squalor that Essendine lounges around in – complete with his eighteen dressing gowns – and the lighting, by Hugh Vanstone and Tim Lutkin, sets an admirable mood of dissipation and morning-after regret. Warchus makes the sensible decision to allow the farcical elements of the play to exist in their own heightened absurdity, but also to ground them in a more melancholy reality. Essendine might, in one of the best running jokes, long to play Ibsen’s Peer Gynt – cue alarmed expressions and frantic attempts to change the subject – but there is a touch of Withnail here as well, albeit with the protagonist having long since played “the Dane”, as well as virtually any other role he can think of. And yet, as the ageing thespian realises, success on its own is not enough.

Still, for all of the moments of Chekhovian poignancy, this is a hilarious night out, anchored by a remarkable star performance. The only way that it might be equalled is if another production goes even further in its gender-swapping and allows Scott’s Fleabag co-star Phoebe Waller-Bridge to take to the stage as Karen Essendine, destroyer of hearts and illusions. But that is a treat that we may have to wait a few years for. Until then, this wonderful Present Laughter is like the best champagne: intoxicating, delicious and far too tempting.