Kitty has not seen her son Arnold for 35 years, since she abandoned the five-year-old and her husband Clive for her lover Lord Porteus. Now the couple have arrived at Arnold’s country house and it seems history is about to repeat itself.
For his wife Elizabeth is about to leave him for the handsome, tennis-playing Teddie. Cue Clive, who has turned up by accident or design and who now has two purposes in mind: to discomfort his ex-wife and former close friend Porteus, and to save his son’s marriage.
One can read into Maugham’s wonderfully-constructed comedy all sorts of parallels with the writer’s own life, but it’s a great piece of writing however the bits fit, with a lovely, contrarian twist at the end that reminded me of George Bernard Shaw.
"Consequences depend on character," Clive says, in one of his proud pronouncements, and this production could not be more fortunate in having terrific actors to explore the richness and complexity of each of them.
Jane Asher’s Kitty is slinky, silky, silly, protecting herself against worldly strife with a tube of bright red lipstick, but possibly just smart enough to realise she has ruined the career of Hughie Porteus, once tipped as a future Prime Minister.
Nicholas Le Prevost is her partner whose bristly, cantankerous attitude is worn like a breastplate over a tender heart. How much he can express with the one placatory word "Yes?" or a single, raised eyebrow.
Clive Francis playing namesake Clive is rather his opposite, elegant in dress, suave in manners, while taking a cheerful, vicarious pleasure in the tetchiness of Kitty’s present relationship that he has quietly helped to provoke.
All are fine performances, but none better than that of Pete Ashmore as boring, pernickety Arnold, who although an MP can be tormented by the thought that the legs on an antique chair he has bought are not authentic. This unlovable—and unloved—twerp is roused to anger, bordering on violence when his wife declares she is off. The explosion of fury from such an unregarded figure is electrifying.
Olivia Vinall captures very well the dilemma facing Elizabeth when, dressed by designer Louie Whitemore in similar style to Kitty, she must decide whether to cause a second scandal in the family by leaving her husband, just as his mother left his father. Daniel Burke plays Teddie, the one character who has stepped out of the 1920s when the play was written—a planter in Malaya, who finds things ripping, but one suspects will be as domineering over his lover as he is with the locals.
Director Tom Littler complements the idea of stolen nests with the regular call of cuckoos in the garden, but the piece remains equivocal about the question of marriage break-up and divorce. It does, however, speak out against social condemnation, something the homosexual Maugham had to suffer during his complicated personal life.
The UK tour of The Circle continues at Richmond Theatre, London, from Tuesday 20 February.