REVIEW: Somerset Maugham revival in Chichester offers plenty of delights

Director Tom Littler argues that Somerset Maugham is an “under-valued playwright.” His production of The Circle makes his case rather nicely.

It’s a play that starts rather slowly, but the rewards are in a brilliant second Act before a third which cools just a little before an ending which underlines the wit, the cleverness and the understanding which underpins it all.

The gist is that, 30 years before, Lady Kitty (Jane Asher on her CFT debut) abandoned her dullard husband Clive (Clive Francis) to run off with his best friend Lord Porteous (Nicholas Le Prevost). Now her daughter-in-law Elizabeth (Olivia Vinall) has engineered her return at the very moment she – Elizabeth – is contemplating doing exactly what Kitty did a generation earlier.

Is it possible to learn from the mistakes of our elders? Are they in fact still mistakes in different times and for different people? These are the questions the play poses across a series of mostly one-to-ones encounters in almost all the permutations, each in turn revealing more of the characters and challenging what we think we know of them.

Asher is terrific as Kitty, the woman who apparently sacrificed so much to lead an apparently “worthless” and “silly” life. Mixing vanity and insight, she bickers with the wonderfully grumpy Lord Porteous (fabulously expressive from Le Prevost). There is great work too from Vinall as the torn Elizabeth, plus Pete Ashmore as her super-dull husband Arnold who seems to reform… but does he?

But the night’s great delight is Clive Francis’ Clive, the wronged man who finds his past suffering thrown in his face – and responds with endless devilry, manipulating them all as he laughs up his sleeve.

The piece is elegantly staged, rightly presented very much as a period piece. Of course, it has lost the shock value it must have had more than a hundred years ago, but there are plenty of lines that hit home wonderfully. Arnold has his fair share in his pompous indignation; Asher’s Lady Kitty is delivered with exquisite comic timing; but it’s Clive, relishing and encouraging the discomfort, who leaves you smiling most.