Review: THE CONSTANT WIFE, Starring Rose Leslie

It's a bold move for the Royal Shakespeare Company to slip in a remake of W Somerset Maugham's 1920s lesser-known comedy about infidelity in amongst more serious offerings like King Lear and Timon of Athens.

But the gamble pays off, with a fine cast providing plenty of laughs in this revival from company co-artistic director Tamara Harvey, armed with a new script by Laura Wade who recently adapted Jilly Cooper's Rivals for ITV in a rather racy way.

Rose Leslie (Game of Thrones, Downton Abbey, Miss Austen) makes her RSC debut as Constance Middleton, a well-heeled young woman who fights back when she discovers something amiss in her marriage.

Luke Norris (The Motive and the Cue, War Horse) is charmingly roguish as Constance's doctor husband, John, and Amy Morgan (The Country Wife, Noises Off) excels as Constance's meddling sister.

However, the real star of the show is scene stealer Kate Burton (Richard's daughter) as Constance's mother. She's a wonderfully, commanding combo of The Importance of Being Earnest's Lady Bracknell and Maggie Smith's Violet Crawley in Downton Abbey. Burton benefits from the fact that she gets many of the good Coward-meets-Wilde lines – and certainly knows how to deliver them.

Wade takes the liberty of tweaking Maugham's play by adding new dialogue, pulling forward a key scene and offering the audience a flashback reminiscent of Harold Pinter's Betrayal. This approach cleverly lets the audience in on secrets some of the characters have yet to discover.

For those concerned this modern take might detract from the allure of the original, rest assured you will still be firmly rooted in the glamour of the Flapper Era, with terrific jazz music by Jamie Cullum. In addition, set and Costume Designer Anna Fleischle's Bauhaus- and Mackintosh-inspired silks and geometric patterns light up the thrust stage, while also illustrating Constance's progression towards becoming an independent woman with ideas of her own.

Mark Meadows' amusing portrayal of Bentley the butler adds a deeper layer by displaying how servants wryly observe questionable behaviour of their upper-class masters. As well as Bentley being an excellent sounding board for Constance, he lets his guard down in a moving moment so we get a glimpse of his own troubles.

The RSC creative team is at its best with marvellous lighting by Ryan Day, believable clipped speech of its time, thanks to voice and dialect coach Paula Stephens. Movement director Annie-Lunnette Deakin-Foster should be commended for the actors' stylised dance steps in scene changes that smoothly carry the play along.

My only small gripe is Leslie's strength in the lead role. I'm a great fan of Leslie, and particularly loved her in The Good Fight and Miss Austen, but her voice is sometimes lost, especially when she's upstage. It seems a shame to miss some of her entertaining lines, but perhaps this will be rectified as the run progresses and she does the same in this jolly good show.

The Constant Wife is at the Royal Shakespeare Theatre in Stratford-upon-Avon until August 2.