Review: THE RAT TRAP, Park Theatre

“Domestic matters are more your domain than mine,” a husband says to his wife in the middle of her working day, echoing a thousand gaslighting, supposedly liberal men who’ve come before and since. There are audible gasps from the audience.

This is testament to the unexpected timelessness of a play Noël Coward wrote at just 18 years old, revived on the occasion of the 100th anniversary of its first performance (though it was written eight years earlier, in 1918). Rejected by Coward himself as a flawed teenage effort, The Rat Trap nonetheless foreshadows the themes that would come to dominate the great comic playwright’s work: a sensitivity to the realities of women’s lives, the shallowness of artists, and above all his pessimism when it comes to marriage.

We begin on the eve of emerging novelist Sheila’s (Lily Nichol) wedding to Keld (Ewan Miller), a significantly less talented writer. Despite her single flatmate Olive (Gina Bramhill) warning her that “two egotists” marrying one another will inevitably mean someone forced to the sidelines, and their neighbours proudly “living in sin”, Sheila feels certain that traditional marriage will only strengthen her and Keld’s intellectual connection. Events, of course, proceed to disabuse her of that notion.

The text itself is certainly not perfect: Keld’s descent into chauvinism not long into his marriage feels rapid and underdeveloped, and the blistering rows that emerge between him and Sheila are sluggishly paced, while somehow also escalating too quickly to physical violence.

But at its best, Coward’s writing can be startlingly prescient and wise beyond its years, whether about the limits of free love (a decade before the Bloomsbury Group discovered that for themselves), or about the toll domestic life takes on women’s creativity. Beyond the major thematic beats, there are some well-observed one-liners about tabloid journalism and the gentrification of Cornwall that would not be out of place in Coward’s better-known plays.

And the cast lend yet further freshness. Sheila provides the show’s emotional barometer much of the time, and Nichol’s expert microexpressions convey her quiet internal battle to continue justifying her choices. Capable backup is found in Miller, who ekes every bit of dark humour out of Keld’s total obliviousness to his own misogyny, and in Bramhill’s wry detachment as the world-weary Olive.

While this production would not be out of place among classic drawing room revivals, there are still some subtler design choices to be found. Set and Costume Designer Libby Watson is a faithful student of the late 1920s, and Sheila’s shift from sophisticated tailoring to a modest sailor-collared day dress in the second act has a quietly devastating impact. As the characters lounge about on chaise longues, Watson has the set draped in a gauzy material, practically begging to be stripped back to reveal the reality behind the illusion.

This revival has apparently been ‘reimagined’ by US playwright Bill Rosenfield, which only seems to extend to perfunctory movement sequences between episodes, that fail to fix the structural issues in Coward’s youthful play. Thankfully, though, The Rat Trap’s ending has been preserved, which lends Sheila dignity without denying the reality of her situation, and overall a compelling case has been made for the play’s reintroduction to the canon.

Read our guest blog from writer Bill Rosenfield here.

The Rat Trap plays at Park Theatre until 14 March