Review: Waiting in the Wings, Pentameters Theatre

Written for Time Out

They don't make them like this any more. Waiting in the Wings, the fiftieth play to emerge from the nib of Noel Coward, arrives at the Pentameters Theatre looking like it's spent the past half-century pickled in formaldehyde.

Toothier productions might have drawn comment on an ageing society or twisted the thumbscrews on a vacuous, backstabbing media culture fueled by gossip. Not so director Aline Waites, who's content to celebrate its gentle joviality and nostalgic pensiveness as is.

This isn't Coward at his best. Set in The Wings, a retirement home where old luvvies go to die, it centres on the rivalry between two grand dames, May Davenport (Frances Cuka) and the newly arrived Lotta Bainbridge (Juliet Aykroyd). But the latter's keenness to appease diffuses any narrative impetus and the setting lends itself to Coward's specialism in snide retorts too easily. Delivered as reflexes, they lose their pointedness.

There's warmth and tenderness enough to redeem the docility of its farce. Waiting in the Wings is laced with a touching melancholy - May, in particular, struggles to accept faded glories. Mostly it throbs with robust vigour and dignity: qualifies exemplified by the veteran performers, with Audrey Nicholson and Maggie McCourt providing a strong case against retirement alongside Cuka and Aykroyd.