Noel Coward never went to RADA. It's a sobering thought that by his early 20s, the age of most RADA students, he had already been earning his living on the stage for a decade or so. But I can imagine him looking down into Malet Street from his perch on a theatrical cloud and applauding enthusiastically at this rare and very entertaining production of one of his early plays.
The Young Idea ran for only eight weeks in the West End in 1923, despite good reviews. Coward was still a year or more away from his breakthrough success with The Vortex at the end of 1924. Though the plot (partly borrowed from Shaw's You Never Can Tell) is derivative and some scenes lack the pared-down perfection of later masterpieces such as Private Lives, the play shows all his precocious talent for comedy and dialogue. The young Coward, like the young Harold Pinter, had a very sharp ear for the way people talked around him, and soaked up their conversation patterns like an absorbent sponge. The Young Idea is set in the philistine hunting country of Middle England, to which the young Coward was introduced by Mrs Astley Cooper. Precocious brother and sister Sholto and Gerda, brought up in Italy by their divorced mother Jennifer, travel back to England to visit their remarried father George in the hope of reuniting their divided family. All at sea in the world of hunting pink, they listen intently, as Coward himself did, and try to pick up the native patois in what their father describes as 'an English hunting county where immorality is conducted by rules and regulations'.
Sholto (the part Coward wrote for himself) and Gerda are superbly incarnated by Oliver Johnstone and Eline Pauwels, who unerringly find the layers of subtext hidden in Coward's dialogue. The characters say one thing but mean something else, but underneath the superficial humour there is always a core of real emotion and feeling. Pauwels is particularly good in the final act, using every trick in the book to torpedo Jennifer's plan to marry a rich American neighbour -- a nicely judged performance from Michael Walters. There are lines which foreshadow Coward's later, greater plays: 'She's got no go in her, that girl. She borrowed the top of my Thermos, and never returned it. Shallow, very shallow.' Adam Jackson-Smith as George has the advantage of being slightly older than the rest of the cast; Coward was in many ways a very conventional moralist, and George's reluctance to divorce his unfaithful second wife out of a sense of duty makes him far more than a stuffy figure of fun.
This is an imaginative production by RADA director Edward Kemp, which revels in 1920s period detail and takes the play beyond proscenium-arch realism with an opening sequence in which Gerda and Sholto mime their long journey by train from Italy to England. The timing is sharp, and though one or two actors don't quite get to grips with how to play Coward, it's a hugely satisfying and funny evening. RADA productions only run for a week or so, but they give a chance to showcase the talents of the future cream of the British acting profession; the surroundings and seating are infinitely more comfortable than in most fringe theatres, the production values are far higher, and the price of tickets is only £12/£9 concessions. Compare that with the cost of seeing Keira Knightley at the Haymarket, and you'll see why RADA, with its interesting choice of plays, is better value for money than almost anything else in London.
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