Love All assessment – Dorothy L Sayers’ battle-of-the-sexes comedy lacks chunk | Theatre

Dorothy L Sayers will not be primarily referred to as a playwright. Higher celebrated as a novelist, she wrote this battle-of-the-sexes comedy of manners in 1940 and it’s by way of no fault of this manufacturing that its laughter lacks chunk.

Bestselling romance author Godfrey (Alan Cox) has left his apparently uninteresting spouse, Edith (Leah Whitaker), for a proficient younger actor, Lydia (Emily Barber). We discover the couple languishing in Venice – she is bored and he’s blocked in his writing, although insists Lydia nonetheless gives artistic inspiration. Each embark on secret journeys away: Godfrey to demand a divorce from Edith solely to find she has reworked into a star author, and Lydia to reinvigorate her stage profession, which brings her into her personal face-off with Edith.

Though it’s directed by Tom Littler with punch and circulate, and carried out by its forged with vigour, it involves really feel like an unchallenging summer time play with laughs which can be simply too mild, neither fairly humorous nor stunning sufficient.

It actually presents a sociological perception right into a turning level for ladies of the inter-war years, and there are vivid portraits of the period’s newly rising unbiased girl, proper all the way down to the play’s two secretaries. However its gender politics on marriage, infidelity and divorce, which should absolutely have been acerbic in its day, really feel pretty toothless now. Godfrey, in the meantime, is so charmless and grating that it’s exhausting to see why Lydia or Edith would ever need him.

The plot goes in an sudden path after the primary act, which is refreshing, however its double identities and coincidences really feel like inventory fare and the anodyne ending provides the drama a way of fading out. There are working jokes about writers and theatre actors however that humour, too, is tame.

Sometimes for this venue its set, designed by Louie Whitemore, comes drenched in environment, capturing Venice’s romance within the first act and with meticulous interval element within the later London scenes. Better of all are Anett Black’s costumes. If the drama is missing, Lydia’s trouser-suit and Edith’s beaded cloak at the very least present lovely distraction.