THE CONSTANT WIFE – REVIEW OF 2025 ROYAL SHAKESPEARE COMPANY PRODUCTION

Reviewed by James Karas 

Many people will recall a play by W. Somerset Maugham called The Constant Wife that opened in Ohio in 1926 and has often been  revived. It is a pleasant comedy about a constant and wonderful wife and an equally wonderful husband with one fly in the ointment, as they say. The husband, you see, is having an affair with the best friend of the constant wife. And she finds out and the play is taken up with the unravelling of that indiscretion.

The Royal Shakespeare Company has decided to revise Maugham’s play by having it updated by Laura Wade and providing a version based on the original.

The facts please.

Constance Middleton (Rose Leslie) and her husband John (Luke Norris) have it made. They are happily married, well off (he is a Harley Street $$$$ surgeon) and the sun is shining and all is well. There is the small issue of John’s roving pecker which has found a nest of repose in the arms Marie-Louise (Emma McDonald) who happens to be Constance’s’ best friend.

ROSE LESLIE AS THE CONSTANT WIFE. Photo: Johan Persson 

That’s bad only if “discovered” as they say and if you want a play, it must be discovered. In this case the Christopher Columbuses are Constance’s blabbermouth younger sister Martha (Amy Morgan) and her more discreet mother Mrs. Culver (Kate Burton). And you guessed it, Martha tells Constance that her husband is unfaithful, and Constance does not go to Texas to buy a gun. We are in civilized London after all.

We need a couple more twists for laughter and a plot to entertain us for a couple of hours of crisp dialogue and funny situations.

Fifteen years ago, Constance knew Bernard (Raj Bajaj) who went abroad and is now back and wants to relight the candle that he had for Constance then. He is handsome, rich and has a Saville Row tailor. What more can one ask for?

Marie-Louise’s oafish husband Mortimer (Daniel Millar) found John’s cigarette case under his wife’s pillow, and he is very suspicious about how it got there. So are we, but please, let’s keep it clean. He barges into the well-appointed Middleton home making seditious accusations about a cigarette case under a pillow. The clever Constance explains that it was she who put the cigarette case there and not her husband who should not be smoking at all let alone before or after coitus or in someone else’s bedroom.

You think about that. (I want to know what they were doing at the precise moment that the cigarette case fell under her pillow but as I said we will behave,) In the meantime, we get a crisp, finely paced and acted comedy. Just watch the textbook-perfectly accented butler Bently (Mark Meadows) then enjoy the beautiful performance of the spunky, intelligent Rose Leslie as Constance. We like Emma McDonal for her fine acting but disapprove of her raunchy character. Well, maybe. Bajaj is the perfect gentleman, and the rest of the cast are wonderful actors at light comedy.

Director Tamara Harvey puts everything together from pace to timing to give us a superb light comedy.

One more fact. Mortimer’s unfounded but factually accurate suspicions are assuaged and Marie-Louise’s predisposition to adultery is or will be satisfied by a non-doctor and they will have their fun, and we will enjoy light comedy at its best. I had to tell you that lest you were concerned about the ending.
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The Constant Wife by Laura Wade based on the play by W. Somerset Maugham continues until August 2, 2025 at the Swan Theatre, Stratford-upon-Avon, England.  https://www.rsc.org.uk/

James Karas is the Senior Editor, Culture, of The Greek Press, Torono