The Constant Wife review — Rose Leslie is a jaunty cuckolded heroine

Times

02-07-2025

A frothily radical Twenties comedy rejigged for the modern palate? The omens were good for the RSC's Stratford premiere of Laura Wade's adaptation of W Somerset Maugham's 1926 play, which puts a cuckolded wife in the driver's seat rather than the dregs of despair. Wade is often a dab hand at mixing privilege, pain and humour: she writes for the TV version of Jilly Cooper's Rivals and wrote the play Posh. Her last work with her director, Tamara Harvey (also co-artistic director of the RSC), was the riveting domestic comedy Home, I'm Darling.
However you split the credit here, though, The Constant Wife is a letdown. It's the sort of evening that is studded with sharp lines, where you can see the sharp ideas and the good intentions, but it simply isn't funny enough to take off for long. Rose Leslie is a fine actress in Game of Thrones and beyond. She makes no mistakes exactly as Constance, the Harley Street doctor's wife who takes an outwardly jaunty, peculiarly pragmatic approach to his affair with her best friend. And yet in her first stage role for nine years Leslie lacks the vocal power and shared sense of fun to make Constance relishable company as she lets loose.
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Light comedy like this calls for an outwardly effortless quality in which everything and nothing matters. Leslie, like most of the cast, handles its demands rather than excels at them. Luke Norris, say, as her husband John, is too fixed in his dashing demeanour for his massive hypocrisies to intrigue. Only Kate Burton — daughter of Richard, star of Grey's Anatomy, a Constance herself on Broadway in 2005 — really has those sort of effortless chops. She owns every barb as Constance's OTT mother, Mrs Culver, who thinks that men are natural rogues and women should accept their lot.
Wade adds jokes, moves lines, merges two characters and expands another, cuts liberally and acutely. Her bigger structural intervention of putting one scene a year in the past, though, makes Constance's subversiveness drag. It ascends into farce a few times, and the plot recap at the start of Act II earns its laughs, but this take on Maugham's feminist fun lacks the ease about itself to segue between high comedy and Shavian earnestness.
The Twenties set, by the usually excellent Anna Fleischle, is starkly modernist enough to make it feel as if the characters are rattling around the big thrust stage. An ending that mixes revenge, forgiveness, deception and realism about dwindling marital passion is spoilt by being so laboured. Imagine Ibsen's A Doll's House, only this time Nora has a lucrative side hustle as an interior designer with which to aid her emancipation.★★☆☆☆140minSwan Theatre, Stratford, to Aug 2, rsc.org.uk
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