It didn’t get its first performance until almost exactly 100 years ago at the Everyman Theatre in Hampstead.
And it is extraordinary that Park Theatre’s revival of a work which deals so deftly with deep emotions, frailties and motivations was written by an 18-year-old recovering in hospital from a nervous breakdown.
The play opens on the eve of Keld and Sheila’s wedding.
Both are writers; self-confident, optimistic and full of fantasies about what will surely be glittering futures.
Sheila reflects that “Over-confidence wrecks happiness; under-confidence wrecks careers.”
Her best friend Gina (a confident and knowing Olive Lloyd-Kennedy) cautions her: unless their egos find a way of living together, the marriage will fall apart.
In act two, the married couple banter about personal creative space then gradually work up to a full-blooded row. Terrible things are said.
Post-interval (to the horror of many in the audience) the feisty and confident Sheila has chosen to become the supportive wife, appearing to bask in the reflected glory of her successful husband and abandon her own writing.
Keld, stupidly equating her support for licence, falls for the attractions of the vampish and manipulative starlet Ruby (a delicious Zoe Goriely).
Director Kirsty Patrick Ward and her amazing team of creatives keep the capacity audience on the edge of their collective seats with an expertly paced production that mines every nuance of Coward’s script.
The enthusiasm of the cast grabbed the imagination: the nice-but-dim next door poets Naomi and Daniel (an excellent double act by Alisa Joy and Daniel Abbott) and the terrific housekeeper Burrage (class divisions deftly exposed by Angela Sims).
Ewan Miller’s Keld is a clever concoction of buffoon and little boy lost.
But Lily Nichol as Sheila steals the show: her character demands a wide range of emotions which she calibrated with much maturity and understanding.
Sheila’s take down of the male ego and self-deception could have been written last week. One hundred years ago, only a gay man could have penned such a radical script!
The Rat Trap runs at Park Theatre in Finsbury Park until March 14.
