Credit to the publicist who angled a ninety year old play into the Herald on Sunday Gossip pages. “Are age-defying celebrities Nicky Watson and Sally Ridge the inspiration for Fallen Angels…?” the paper breathlessly asks. It explains that the play “tells the story of two former BFFs who shared a lover when they were younger… Sound familiar?”, then replays the “Matthewgate” scandal. What is most scandalous about the fluff is that nowhere is the name of playwright Noël Coward mentioned, and if one didn’t know better, you’d put the paper down thinking the play really was based on the lives of Auckland socialites. Maybe this is why Auckland Theatre Company were able to extend the play for a week before it opened? 

Auckland audiences have been slowly rediscovering the Cowardian comedy over the last few years: ATC last presented ‘The Master’ in 2008 with Design for Living (also starring Lisa Chappell), and Silo did their hipster version of Private Lives in 2012. In Fallen Angels, once again Coward’s genius shines through: supreme honey dipped-wit, absurd social situations, and a revealing eye on sexual politics and human hypocrisy. [More]

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This Noel Coward drawing room farce is light and entertaining, and its mocking of the slut/stud double standard is still depressingly relevant, even after nearly 90 years. 

Lisa Chappell and Claire Dougan star as women behaving badly, remembering pre-marital affairs and anticipating possible extra-marital ones. They enjoy life – lustily singing, drinking, eating, arguing and talking about sex. Such unapologetic gusto is great to see. [More]

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Auckland Theatre Company opens the 2014 season with a stylish revival of Noel Coward’s Fallen Angels. The two ‘fallen angels’, best friends Julia (Lisa Chappell) and Jane (Claire Dougan), have a dilemma: they’re perfectly happy with nice husbands Fred (Stephen Lovatt) and Willy (Stelios Yiakmis); they’re just not in love anymore which, as Jane blithely informs Fred, is to be expected after five years of marriage.   

However, their happy-but-safe existences are put into a spin when their husbands go away on a weekend golf trip and their mutual ex-lover, the sexy Frenchman Maurice (Jonathan Allen), announces via postcard, he’s coming to pay them a visit.

What are they to do – flee for fear of falling madly for him again, or stay and bravely face him? And if they do stay, weak-willed and desperate for passion as they admit they are, what happens then…?

Thus the great game of waiting for Maurice begins. The women work themselves up over dinner and champagne, trying and failing to keep it together in front of the maid, Saunders (Priyanka Xi). More champagne leads to histrionics and they fight so badly Jane runs off.

The drama is ramped up by the joy of misunderstanding when their respective husbands arrive home early and each woman tearfully spills the beans, thinking the other has betrayed them and run off with Maurice… And then of course Maurice does arrive. 

First presented in 1925 to wide critical outrage and public popularity, the play has been noted as one of the precursors to Absolutely Fabulous and you love Julia and Jane behaving badly just as much as Eddie and Patsy.

Of course the content was shocking at the time: married women talking about not just about sex, but extra-marital sex, admitting they want it, getting drunk and being ‘beastly’. 

It’s wonderful. Watching Jane, dressed in a lavish sequin gown (a special note must go to the exquisite costumes and set design by Tracy Grant Lord), blind drunk crawling around the floor and getting stuck under the table all the while hurting insults at Julia is wonderful physical comedy.

It’s a delight. The play has been called the end of drawing room comedies as this one is actually about something. And yes, the characters are melodramatic and Noel Coward’s dialogue is overblown to the modern ear, but the actors handle it wonderfully, emphasising the fact, that at its heart, Fallen Angels is a stylish but honest glimpse into female desire and extra material affairs, which at the time simply wasn’t acknowledged – and if it was it was strictly the right of men.   

The play is still as fresh and amusing, while albeit perhaps more funny than shocking, as it was when it was first banned in Holland in 1925. In the wrong hands Fallen Angles could fall into being simply melodramatic, but this production, with a strong cast directed by the excellent Raymond Hawthorne, is a delicious romp, masterfully executed.

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