The Constant Wife plays Somerset Maugham for laughs

We are in 1920s London, in the drawing room of the “constant wife”, Constance. When the not-so-clandestine affair she has been trying to ignore between her Harley Street surgeon husband and her flibbertigibbet best friend is finally exposed, Constance faces a fundamental question. What is the nature of the relationship between two married people if they no longer desire one another? The way to the answer, the action suggests, lies through financial and sexual liberation.

Laura Wade reworks Somerset Maugham’s sparkling 1926 comedy in unexpected ways, retaining most of the lines, but not necessarily in the same order. Some aspects of Wade’s approach feel contemporary: the rejection of dramatic suspense in favour of a more televisual, narrative-style development using flashback; the tilting of the comedy towards Whitehall farce; the insertion of a meta-theatrical element (characters failing to get to the theatre to see a production of The Constant Wife).

In other ways, Wade’s play is more conventional. This is particularly apparent in the ending (which is closer to the 1929 film adaptation, Charming Sinners; not to be given away here) and in a softening of the character of Constance, presented by Maugham as highly individual, independent and self-sufficient; but by Wade in more generic heroine form, putting on a brave face, confiding in sympathetic men, plotting with other women.

Plentiful in both plays, though, is laughter. If Maugham’s attacks on social double standards towards men and women are blunted, his lines are still razor-sharp, delivered with relish by director Tamara Harvey’s ensemble cast. Special mention to Rose Leslie (Downton Abbey and Game of Thrones) as poised Constance and to Luke Norris as her bumptious errant husband.

With the added attraction of jazz artist Jamie Cullum’s original compositions to cover scene changes, this RSC production seems tailor-made for a West End transfer.

The Constant Wife runs at the Swan theatre, Stratford upon Avon, until 2 August