Coward’s plays can lie just beneath the surface of surburban living. In his fine play The Vortex, incest is the stumbling block to a happy, sexually fulfilled life, while in Fallen Angels, there is the controversial scene where the two upper class female protagonists spend a deliriously delicious get together over dinner for two getting hopelessly drunk together.

The 1920s audiences loved it - it shattered public mores about the pros and cons of being a woman, most probably would have drawn the favourable attention of feminists and Suffragettes alike, but drew outraged cries of “vulgar”, “shocking” or “outrageous” from critics in general, who also managed to throw words like “degenerate”, “vile” and “obscene” in Coward’s direction. The two women, close friends and confidantes, around whom the plot, such as it is, revolves were dismissed as “suburban sluts”.

But that was 80 years or so ago. The world has changed since then and so you ask yourself after a plot-laying, slightly dull first act, when you may find yourself distracted by Paul Farnsworth’s exquisite set, why all this brouhaha about two women who (seemingly unknown to each other) had sex with the same man in Europe many years before.

Well, it’s always the husbands who cause dramatic tension in plays such as this.

Will they find out and, when they do - if they do, will divorce follow?

When the Latin lover turns up in London and finally confronts the husbands with their wives’ earlier indiscretions, the fun begins.

But audiences seemed pleased and generally uncorrupted and generally undismayed by the colourless ooze which drips from these characters in the name of comedy, and I smiled rather than exploded with laughter. The costumes styles were more Forties than Twenties and badly need re-structuring, but there were good performances all round, particularly from Sarah Crowe as Jane Banbury and Gillian McCafferty as one of Coward’s irrepressible maids. Applause all round for Philip Battley as Maurice, the initial cause of all the trouble, who dripped Gallic charm. Roy Marsden, who directed, put them all through their paces with his usual skill.

The play runs until Saturday