“The Marquise” at Theatre Royal Bath

Simon Thomas in South West England
★★★★☆
17 June 2026

It’s extraordinary to think that by 1927, when The Marquise was first staged, Noël Coward had already written a dozen plays despite being only 28 years old. These included The Vortex, which had catapulted him to fame four years earlier, and Hay Fever, an enduringly popular work due shortly for revival in the West End. It would be another five years before he wrote his most renowned comedy, Private Lives.

Eva O’Hara and Simon Shepherd.
Photo credit: Alastair Muir.

If The Marquise is less well-known, it’s not due to inferior writing. If anything, the structure is tighter and the observation more acute than some of the later works, which Coward famously churned out without revisions, as he rested somewhat complacently on his considerable laurels. Coward’s own dismissal of it as “a tenuous, frivolous little piece” can’t have helped its reputation.

In a perceptive programme note, Philip Wilson, the director of this touring production which sprang to life at Windsor’s Theatre Royal, posits the idea that the play is more akin to Ibsen than better-known Coward. There are elements of farce and contrivance to what is after all the lightest of comedies but he’s right about the subtle way that the playwright depicts forgotten love, lost youth, regret, and shame with a poignancy that lingers beneath the elegant surface. Coward skilfully combines these poetic components, reminiscent of some of his finest writing, with some fairly broad comedy moments.

As with many an Ibsen, crises are precipitated by a return of past actions, as misdemeanours are unearthed and reckonings are forced on reluctant participants. Coward wrote the piece as a historical romance, highly unusual for him, setting it in early 18th-century France. This revival, the first in some decades, updates the play to the time of writing two centuries later and, while 1935 fits the action like a glove, there’s a slight regret that we don’t get to see Coward in less familiar territory. Apart from the French and Spanish names, it plays like any other of his terribly English comedies which we’ve seen a thousand times.

Simon Shepherd.
Photo credit: Alastair Muir.

The play opens with Le Comte Raoul de Vriaac and his old-time friend and fellow debauchee Esteban el Duco Santaguano fixing up a marriage between their respective offspring Miguel and Adrienne. But it soon becomes clear that both love another, Miguel a dancer (here a “he” rather than a “she”) and Adrienne the Comte’s somewhat nondescript secretary Jacques. Out of the blue the vivacious and scheming Marquise Eloise de Kestournel turns up and installs herself in Raoul’s chateau, stirring up both past and present and revealing painful secrets in a soufflé of troubles. The play soon resembles a comedy of errors, ingeniously worked, with an inevitable resolution of alliances, as past regrets and hidden truths spill out of a Pandora’s box of deceit and self-denial.

Juliet Aubrey is a lithe and posturing Eloise with a glimpse of vulnerability, as her true feelings are finally revealed. Simon Shepherd and Tristan Gemmill square up to each other as, respectively, the uptight Raoul, who has left his erstwhile philandering way behind for a life of comfortable and unthreatening middle age, and the louche Esteban, who has never relinquished his sexual voyaging and quest for hedonistic pleasure. Their final clash in a preposterous duel scene descends perhaps too much into farcical territory but, otherwise, the three leads play out the comedy with urbane and meticulous excellence.

Eve O’Hara and Barnaby Tobias are bright and attractive as the would-be young couple, who hatch their own plot to avoid an unhappy future, but Albie Marber seems a little ill at ease as the unassuming Jacques Rijar. Otherwise, this is a fast-moving and entertaining revival that does justice to Coward’s amusing and poignant scenario. Martin Carroll and Lee Peck give strong support as the stock comedy priest Father Clement and all-knowing major domo Hubert.

Colin Falconer provides immaculate costumes and art deco set to round off a delightful production of a play that director Wilson rightly declares to be deserving of greater exposure.