Somerset Maugham's cheating husband comedy gets the Rivals treatment

Telegraph

02-07-2025

The Constant Wife, Somerset Maugham 's neglected 1926 comedy about a marriage rendered wretched by infidelity might seem like an odd choice for the RSC. Yet, as revived by the company's co-artistic director Tamara Harvey – using a deft new script by Laura Wade, who wrote the recent steamy TV adaptation of Jilly Cooper's, Rivals – it lightly asks big questions about relationships and empowerment. A luminous Rose Leslie leads the fine cast as Constance, a woman who is being cheated on by her husband John, a Harley Street doctor, but stands by him the better to forge a different life.
Wade tucks in new lines in keeping with Maugham's droll, Wildean dialogue. Her most daring move, though, is to restructure his plot: she brings forward a showdown (from Act II) in which the stoutish Mortimer (Daniel Millar) – whose wife has been having an affair with John (Luke Norris) – arrives to confront the adulterous pair. In its day, it must have been a pretty incendiary scene. Maugham has Constance counter-intuitively take up the cudgels on behalf of the duplicitous couple, protesting their innocence while indicating to the duo that she knows all about their betrayal.
Adding another layer, Wade drops in a flashback, which shows Constance, unseen, witnessing the infidelity. This approach cuts more quickly to the fact that Constance is keeping up appearances, and putting on an act. At once, the evening gains more humour from this knowingness (there are added allusions to the theatricality of the tangled affairs, too) and further stabs of pain, as many lines, from early on, carry a subtext of concerted deflection and repression.
Leslie (who starred on TV in Game of Thrones and, off-screen, married its heart-throb, Kit Harington) is terrific as a woman who – rather like Nora in Ibsen 's A Doll's House – has a nominally pampered life, but in fact is suffocating from a lack of agency. Clipped and clear-eyed, Leslie brings a winning insouciance to the aphoristic dialogue, as though merely arranging silverware, but it's serrated stuff.
There are notable parallels with Maugham's life, which was dogged by marital unhappiness, stoked by the author's homosexual affairs. Constance turns to interior design as a route to independence – just as Maugham's wife, Syrie Wellcome, did.
But there's something more broadly generational and lastingly pertinent, too, about this wronged woman's cool-headed strategy for survival. She must overcome the sexist, conformist attitudes of the age, many of them brazenly articulated by her interfering, Lady Bracknell-ish mother (a superb Kate Burton). She also has to reconcile a demand for true happiness with a recognition that even a marriage that has dimmed can still be worth the candle. This nuanced dilemma feels at once both wholly of its period and utterly modern – and fully warrants the further life that Maugham's play is given here.