'Fallen Angels' review — Janie Dee and Alexandra Gilbreath are a hoot in Noël Coward's risqué comedy

Read our review of Fallen Angels, directed by Christopher Luscombe, now in performances at the Menier Chocolate Factory to 21 February 2026.

Summary

• Noël Coward's 1925 comedy gets a fresh revival at the Menier Chocolate Factory
• The play centres on two unsatisfied wives who are thrilled by the return of their French lover
• Janie Dee and Alexandra Gilbreath revel in their characters' big set-piece argument
• Sarah Twomey is also very funny as the multi-talented maid

“Search the marmalade!” No, this command comes not from the jam-minded musical Paddington but from an agitated Janie Dee well into the second half of this centenary revival, directed by Christopher Luscombe, of Noël Coward’s 1925 comedy.

When first seen, Dee’s beautifully attired Julia Steroll is all coolly collected elegance, coupled with the occasional arched eyebrow as she confesses to Fred (Richard Teverson), her husband of 10 years, that she still loves him without quite being in love with him.

Julia has woken up that day with a “presentiment”, as, it turns out, has her great friend Jane Banbury (Alexandra Gilbreath), who is also part of a passionless marriage – in her case to Bill (Christopher Hollis). The foreboding has to do with the presumed arrival in their midst after many years of the Frenchman, Maurice Duclos (a soigné Graham Vick, entering at the 11th hour), with whom both women carried on separate dalliances back in the day in different parts of Italy.

Since married to decent if dull partners with whom there is no more erotic spark, Julia and Jane pulsate with excitement at the reappearance of Maurice – a prospect that undoes the civility that is their byword for life. Every telephone ring sets the libido aquiver, and someone new at Julia’s front door is accompanied with a frisson worthy of the Second Coming. (In the sort of line that dates the play, Julia references how few people come to call who are “not aggressively English”.)

A star vehicle for its two leading ladies, Fallen Angels was famously revived in the West End in 2000 as a stonking opportunity for Felicity Kendal and, especially, Frances de la Tour, who lifted the play’s slightness into the comic stratosphere. Intriguingly, this same title will be seen on Broadway in the spring, starring Tony winner Kelli O’Hara and a hotly Oscar-tipped Rose Byrne.

Unfolding on an airy Art Deco set from Simon Higlett, and costumed to kill by Fotini Dimou, this iteration of the play is good fun, to be sure, not least in an opening stretch in which Dee rivets attention whilst simply reading the newspaper. You sense at once the sexual wasteland of a marriage that has lost its heat and the potential for regeneration once both husbands absent themselves from the action in order – what else? – to play golf. (The men’s plus-fours are period-perfect.)

Having established the situation, Coward has to work hard to sustain it across three acts. On hand to assist is one of this writer’s scene-stealing maids (you’ll recognise the type from the better-known Blithe Spirit), who on this occasion seems to know something about everything and has spent time, if you please, in the Ballets Russes: cue a brief balletic interlude, movement by Nicola Keen.

That part is here in the singularly funny hands of Sarah Twomey, who gamely plays the piano, speaks perfect French, and allows her character’s name to be changed, rather improbably, from Jasmine to Saunders.

The play’s set-piece is a gallopingly drunken dinner between Saunders’s employer, Julia, and an increasingly guttural, grunting Jane. Their set-to is worthy of the tea-taking between Cecily and Gwendolen in The Importance of Being Earnest, which Coward may well have had in mind whilst writing, or the more recent antics of Ab Fab’s Patsy and Edina.

Julia snarls defiantly that she is fully “hinged” – as opposed to that word’s more frequently used opposite – and Dee and Gilbreath both revel in the opportunity to find the chaos underpinning Coward’s landscape of composure. Coward was bold back in the day to put centre stage two women jointly possessed of a past, but the play these days seems a fragile edifice here given brio and ballast by two women not afraid to be “brazen” (Coward’s own word) in order to land their affectionately earned laughs.

Fallen Angels is at the Menier Chocolate Factory to 21 February 2026. Book Fallen Angels tickets on LondonTheatre.co.uk

Photo credit: Fallen Angels (Photos by Manuel Harlan)