Somerset Maugham, who in theatre history came midway between Oscar Wilde and Noël Coward, was the most popular British playwright of the first two decades of the 20th century. He has been shamefully neglected.
Tom Littler, the new artistic director of the Orange Tree Theatre, begins his tenure with a highly enjoyable revival of The Circle, which is generally thought to be Maugham’s best play. A classic social satire, it premiered in 1921, an era when divorce really was a big scandal and social ostracism was inevitable.
Maugham, who had a deeply unhappy marriage himself, writes with wit and cynicism. Some members of the 1921 audience found the comedy offensive and booed.
Arnold Champion-Cheney (Pete Ashmore), a 35-year-old MP, has been married for three years and is much more interested in his career and antique furniture than he is in his wife, Elizabeth (Olivia Vinall). When he was 5 years old, his mother ran off with a married man, his father’s best friend. The scandal wrecked both men’s political careers. It now looks as if his wife Elizabeth is about to repeat his mother’s mistake and bolt with a breezy, young rubber planter from the Malay States, Teddie Luton (Chirag Benedict Lobo).
Lady Kitty (Jane Asher), Arnold’s aged mother and Lord Porteous (Nicholas Le Prevost), her aged lover, constantly bickering, are at one and the same time an amusing and a potent warning to any young couple intending to elope.
Kitty, once one of the great beauties of her day, is a caricature of a pretty woman grown old; whilst Porteous, a grumpy old man, lumbered with a silly frivolous woman, feels that it is he, who is the injured party and not her husband (Clive Francis) who has had a happy sex-fulfilling life and no intention of taking Kitty back.
Clive Francis (who incidentally played Teddie 47 years ago) does not hide the husband’s unpleasant streak. The production’s major innovation is to change Teddie Luton into an Asian, which raises racial issues which neither the text nor the production address. A 1921 audience would have been outraged and would have booed even louder.
With Tom Littler at the helm, Orange Tree audiences can look forward to more revivals of neglected playwrights and plays, which is good news for theatre lovers.
To learn more about Robert Tanitch and his reviews, click here to go to his website. 
