Cambridge Arts Theatre – until Saturday 28th February 2026
Reviewed by Steph Lott
5*****
I’ll confess I arrived at the Cambridge Arts Theatre last night with certain expectations. Noel Coward. Champagne wit. Elegant drawing rooms. Clever dialogue. What I was not prepared for was to leave having witnessed something blisteringly funny and devastating in equal measure.
Easy Virtue, written in 1924, is not the play I had anticipated. Trevor Nunn’s production makes absolutely certain you understand how different this play is. Yes, the wit is there — and it is razor sharp, every line honed to a fine and dangerous edge — but Coward’s deeper intention reveals itself with increasing force as the evening progresses. He wanted, apparently, to write a comedy in the structure of a tragedy. Mission accomplished. A century on, it lands with all the weight of both.
The Cambridge Arts Theatre was packed to the rafters, and from the moment the curtain rose the audience were utterly gripped. You could feel it — that particular collective stillness that means a full house has forgotten it’s a full house.
Much of the credit for that must go to the extraordinary cast assembled here. Michael Praed as Colonel Whittaker brings a quiet dignity to his portrayal of a man who has clearly long since stopped fighting battles he knows he cannot win. His rapport with Greta Scacchi — superb as his wife, giving an excellent comic turn as a woman who has elevated passive aggression to something approaching high art — is a masterclass in what two skilled actors can communicate without saying very much at all. There is a lifetime of damage in every exchange between them, and it is utterly believable.
At the centre of the storm stands Alice Orr-Ewing as Larita Whittaker, the American divorcée whose arrival into this very English household acts as a kind of lit match thrown into dry tinder. It is an extraordinary performance — poised, electric, and deeply humane. Orr-Ewing never allows Larita to become merely a victim, nor merely a provocateur. She is both, and neither, and entirely her own person. You feel the indignity heaped upon her while simultaneously understanding why she cannot simply bend. She carries the play on her shoulders and makes it look effortless.
But my personal favourite was Grace Hogg-Robinson as the petulant Hilda. This is a star turn of the highest order. Comic and monstrous, she crackled in every scene.
The whole cast, frankly, deserve recognition. The blistering dialogue was delivered with marvellous pace and fluidity — not a single beat dropped, not a line thrown away.
Simon Higlett’s set and costume design deserves its own paragraph. Stepping into that world felt effortless and complete — the textures, the colours, the architecture of the space all conspiring to transport us back in time without a single false note.
Go. Do not expect a light evening.