Review: Present Laughter at the Liverpool Playhouse ****
“A torrent of wit and fun, and at what a pace Mr Coward turns it on.”
Thus wrote one reviewer when Present Laughter reached Liverpool's Royal Court in November 1942 on an extensive tour of the provinces as part of Coward’s Play Parade triumvirate of audience pleasers which also included This Happy Breed and Blithe Spirit.
Eight decades on, the writer/actor/director/all-round wit’s light-hearted farce – emphasis on the light - is back in town, this time around the corner in Williamson Square, with an audacious makeover that reimagines its chief protagonist in an immediately entertaining but also thought-provoking way.
Coward might not initially recognise this 2026 iteration with its flipping of the sexes and relocated place and time, but one suspects he’d enjoy and appreciate it all the same.
Last year Tracy-Ann Oberman played a Jewish matriarch Shylock in a 1936 East End-set Merchant of Venice on the Playhouse stage.
Now she returns as Coward’s theatrical and self-obsessed successful pre-war London thespian Garry Essendine, reborn as Geri, a glamorous British female star shining brightly in hedonistic 1970s New York.
This swapping of the sexes (Oberman’s idea) stretches well beyond Present Laughter’s central character to encompass half-a-dozen different roles, from Essendine’s unflappable ex Liz, who here becomes Len (Adrian Lukis) and long-suffering secretary Monica – reborn as James Dreyfus’s delightfully and malleably expressive Monty, to various business partners and infatuated hangers-on.
A musing on fame, the burden of celebrity, and theatricality verses reality, the playwright conceived Present Laughter’s Essendine as a preening but emotionally fragile Peter Pan figure, facing 40 (just as Coward was when he penned the play in a mere six days in 1939), managed by ever present staff and advisors and relentless in the pursuit of pleasure via unsuitable, rather desperate dalliances - which Len describes as "all this casual scampering about" - in an attempt to stave off both looming middle age and the ever present spectre of loneliness amid the crowd.
As a fellow audience member pointed out to me before the start - Essendine is an anagram of neediness.
Above left: Geri Essendine (Tracy-Ann Oberman) and David Sillington (Seb Carrington). Right: James Dreyfus as Monty. Top: The cast of Present Laughter. Photos by Simon Annand.
Oberman clearly revels in both Coward’s frothy and whip-smart script and the possibilities offered by turning Garry into Geri, posing questions about societal expectations and conventions, sexual double standards and examining the agency available to a woman which comes with age and success.
She delivers a fabulously luminous, bravura performance as the irresistible but monstrous ego around which all others orbit, a lustrously tressed roaring girl in spangly jumpsuits and platforms.
Incidentally, Peter McKintosh’s New York loft apartment set is a homage to that ego, with its giant Warhol-inspired portraits of Geri on the walls.
Coward’s other characters appear to exist chiefly to serve the plot and most remain rather two-dimensional, if never less than flamboyantly amusing, and the cast certainly have great fun with them, working together as a well-oiled machine. And I'm not just talking about the much frequented drinks trolley.
Among the more overtly dramatic are Seb Carrington’s starstruck ingenue David (originally Daphne) Sillington who pursues Geri with youthful and relentless vigour, and Eva Feller as Rosina (originally Roland) Maule, a strange and obsessive young playwright.
Meanwhile the manipulative femme fatale Joanna, wife of Essendine’s manager Henry, is recast as Johannes, husband of Henrietta. Kit Young’s vain and cocky lothario here also becomes an equal opportunities predator, seducing both Geri’s producer Morris (Jonathan Tafler) and Geri herself.
But there’s also an added undercurrent and, as all women will recognise, an unpleasant additional power dynamic at play when at one point he barks at her to sit down and you know that unlike with Joanna, behind Johannes' words lies the ever-present threat of brute force.
Coward’s witty dialogue works as well in a Studio 54 era Big Apple as it does in 1930s London, although occasionally it would be nice if the lines were given a little more time to land before the action powers on.
That said, this Present Laughter has an irrepressible warmth and vivacity – just the tonic in these uncertain days where, in the words of Feste the clown who inspired Coward’s title, ‘what’s to come is still unsure’.