Review: The Constant Wife at the Liverpool Playhouse ****1/2

What would you do if you discovered your other half was cheating on you?

Pack a bag and leave? Throw them out and change the locks – having first taken scissors to their wardrobe? Or go down the Beyoncé route and channel you pain into an acclaimed best-selling album?

Constance Middleton (Kara Tointon), the heroine of Laura Wade’s larky, sparky, stylish adaptation of W Somerset Maugham’s 1920s ‘comedy of manners’, opts for a more measured but no less decisive and devastating response when she discovers her husband John in flagrante delicato with her best friend Marie-Louise (Gloria Onitiri).

The well-healed Middletons seem to have it all. John (Tim Delap) is a high-flying Harley Street surgeon while Constance is an immaculately turned-out chatelaine and mother with exquisite taste, poise, intelligence and calm self-possession.

But London society knows differently with everyone aware of the affair apart from, seemingly, Constance, leading to a lively tussle between her prickly and forthright businesswoman sister Martha (Amy Vicary-Smith) and male apologist mother (Sara Crowe) over whether she should be put in the picture.

All is not what it seems however, as we discover during a first half which rattles along in a whirl of brisk and witty dialogue and droll bon mots like the love child of Oscar Wilde and Noel Coward.

Incidentally, the same year Somerset Maugham’s play received its premiere over in the US – 1926, making it a centenarian this year – Coward’s satire This Was a Man was banned from performance on the British stage by the Lord Chamberlain for its light-hearted depiction of adultery.

Above: From left Martha (Amy Vicary-Smith), Marie-Louise (Gloria Onitiri), Constance (Kara Tointon) and Mrs Culver (Sara Crowe). Top: Tointon as Constance Middleton. Photos by Mihaela Bodlovic.

Anyway, Crowe gets to deliver the bulk of the most withering witticisms as a figure from another era who believes men aren’t made for monogamy and it’s the wife’s responsibility to keep them cossetted, charmed and entertained.

Wade has reshaped Maugham’s original script, shearing it of a character - Constance’s confidante Barbara, an interior designer - and redistributing her role between Martha and the Middleton's loyal butler Bentley, tweaking the timeframe and injecting a running meta-theatrical joke concerning Constance and her faithful friend Bernard’s (Alex Mugnaioni) repeatedly stymied attempts to attend the theatre to see…The Constant Wife, a play about fidelity.

“I think it’s a farce,” Constance says, deadpan.

Tointon exudes warmth and a Ready Brek-style glow as the wronged wife who opts for calm pragmatism as she negotiates her husband’s infidelity to carve out an independent role for herself, and she maintains a fine balance between vulnerability and steeliness.

Above: Philip Rham as Bentley the butler. Photo by Mihaela Bodlovic.

Around her, the rest of the cast evidently relish their roles, including Rham who is completely delightful as the inscrutable major domo, Onitiri as the blithe ‘other woman’, and Jules Brown who makes a brief but memorable appearance as Marie-Louise’s cuckolded husband Morty.

He plays a central role in the rejigged second act and its fallout after the interval, a deliciously delivered cavalcade of infuriating DARVO, gaslighting and amusing self-obsession.

This touring production from David Pugh started its life as a deservedly well-received part of Stratford's 2025 season.

Director Tamara Harvey, whose previous collaboration with Wade was the wildly successful Home, I’m Darling (which went from Theatr Clwyd to the West End and won an Olivier), maintains a nimble pace throughout, although I’m not entirely convinced by the movement device used to take us from present to past and back again.

Meanwhile designer Ann Fleischle has created a stylishly conceived Art Deco drawing room with a neat use of scrim to give us a view of a landing and grand staircase beyond, while her 20s costume design is also on point. And very covetable!

And the icing on the jazz era cake comes courtesy of Jamie Cullum who has created a toothsome, original 20s-inspired score.