Present Laughter casts Robert Bathurst as Garry Essendine the smooth matinee idol, with a boyish tuft of dyed hair (think Macca and his subtle chestnut tints) whose real business is the love affair, his various conquests feed the ageing star’s vanity. The play asks when does an actor, if ever, remove the mask? Are his bedroom speeches just another tired performance to win over impressionable hearts?
      Essendine, about to embark on a major African tour, is beset with amorous complications. A young woman Daphne (played in all her ardent and annoying hero-worship) by Dorothea Myer-Bennett thinks she has at last unmasked the real Essendine. His cruel post-coital speech in which he refuses to say goodbye but settles for the more impermanent ‘au-revoir’ is a master class in cliché and evasion. He is not worthy of her love etc and then gives her a large dose of Shelley to be going home with. After a liberating bout of sex, Daphne in all her wide-eyed idiocy believes the real Essendine to be the one which the audience knows is the most inauthentic: quotes, borrowed emotions and melodrama. But one wonders are we meant to like Essendine?
      Essendine, spoilt and weak-willed, dominated by his ex-wife and his brilliantly nasal secretary played by Belinda Lang is in a long tradition of deceivers undeceived—he knows he is a sham, demonstrated by his collapse on the sofa when Daphne exits—yet he can’t stop acting up. The costume supervisor Hilary Lewis showed fabulous taste in his range of ornate dressing gowns, it’s as if he is waiting to be made up in between each performance, raring to start hyper-ventilating his emotions in the bedroom.
      Tim Bouverie in his first professional production plays a male hero-worshipper, Roland Maule, who has a huge crush on Essendine. He works as a foil to Essendine’s bravura performances, getting him genuinely angry so a real emotion can at last escape through the carapace. It is Maule who represents all the pretensions of the new theatrical school with Essendine standing up for entertainment pure and simple; it is this flashing point that enables Essendine to feel and think a bit more deeply than his usual auto-pilot romances.
      The romantic body-count continues in Michael Taylor’s wonderfully spacious set with corridors hung with bachelor prints leading off to unknown floors and a window view with tree trunk and wisteria. By the end the play has come to challenge the audience’s own experiences, the savagery that is committed under a civilized veneer. Essendine may be a total fraud but how many of us manage to remain authentic when the heart starts beating fast and our words overreach the mark in the moment’s excitement?
Daniel Jeffreys