When Noël Coward’s Fallen Angels was first staged a hundred years ago in 1925, the critics dismissed it as vulgar, disgusting, shocking, nauseating, vile, obscene and degenerate, an insult to British motherhood. Which, as you would expect, was excellent for the box office.
The second act had what was thought to be a particularly degrading spectacle. Two respectable, middle-aged married women, the best of friends, get spectacularly drunk whilst awaiting the arrival of a former French lover, the great passion of their lives before they were married.
Fallen angels were the staple diet of late-Victorian and Edwardian theatre. Coward didn’t take adultery as seriously as they had and his amoral, brittle, flippant, cynical script took a more French farcical approach to the subject.
Coward, well aware of its weaknesses, never counted the play amongst his best. Today, it has the disadvantage that it no longer shocks and has to rely totally on the inventive business and comic expertise of the actors
Christopher Luscombe directs the present revival which stars Janie Dee and Alexandra Gilbreath who spend a great deal of their time getting drunk and quarrelling and insulting each other whilst looking forward to some sex, which they have not had for some time with their golfing husbands.
Sarah Tomey has the over-extended comic role of a maid who is far more talented than her employers and can do anything and everything better than they can. She also sings, plays the piano and even absurdly ballet dances whilst shifting the furniture. The latter is a step too far.
P.S. Noel Coward was only 23 years old when he wrote Fallen Angels: and would go on to write better plays – The Vortex, Private Lives, Design for Living, Present Laughter, Blithe Spirit – which are still regularly performed. He dominated British theatre in the 1920’s and 1930’s and in the 1940’s wrote two major films: In Which We Serve and Brief Encounter.
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