Present Laughter introduces us to a chic, louche and highly successful theatrical globetrotter, Garry Essendine, whose riotous social life is centred on his swish London apartment. This is Noël Coward’s version of Noël Coward. In the script, from 1942, Coward alleges that his alter ego is being chased by three women. The in crowd would have laughed at the reference to Coward’s secret orientation but this version rather earnestly converts one of the females into a rugged Spanish male.
What for? Few scripts from the wartime era remain in the theatrical canon and one of the pleasures of seeing a vintage play is to examine the habits and conventions of a half-forgotten age. The director, Matthew Warchus, seems to assume that audiences today are narrow-minded bumpkins who can’t comprehend any morality but their own. And by forcing Garry out of the closet, Warchus stifles the play’s teasingly cynical atmosphere, and he removes a layer of emotional pain from the central character.
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