The Constant Wife, Edinburgh review: 'hilarious'

The Constant Wife, Festival Theatre, Edinburgh ★★★★

If Scottish culture is often defined by its willingness to challenge and and mock itself, Somerset Maugham’s 1926 play The Constant Wife - now touring the UK in last year’s Royal Shakespeare Company production - belongs to an age when England’s supremely confident upper-middle class theatre culture barely thought to question itself at all, in terms of the form, voice and shape of the play.

The Constant Wife is therefore a three-act piece set in the smart London drawing-room of its heroine, Constance Middleton, and her Harley Street surgeon husband, John; where a cast of seven invincibly posh and privileged characters, plus Bentley the butler, mill around trying to deal with a slow-burning crisis triggered by John’s affair with Constance’s supposed best friend, Marie-Louise.

READ MORE: The High Life, Dundee review: 'a wild ride of a show' starring Alan Cumming and Forbes Masson

What the play lacks in social and theatrical radicalism, though, it slightly makes up in its raging impatience with sexual convention, and with the sexist gender politics of earlier times, hilariously spelled out by national treasure Sara Crowe as Constance’s mother.

In playwright Laura Wade’s 2025 version of the play - complete with clever flashback structure, and some strongly feminist language - Strictly winner Kara Tointon delivers a graceful and forceful performance as Constance, who finally works out how to rebalance her relationship with John for the long voyage of marriage; and Jamie Cullum’s gorgeous jazz score adds depth and texture, as the characters move and hesitate between scenes like lost souls, in a dim landscape of unsettling social change.

The Constant Wife is at the Festival Theatre, Edinburgh, until 4 April.

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