This neglected early play by Noel Coward — written in 1918 when he was 19 and had been drafted and invalided out of the army with neurasthenia and “tubercular tendency” during training — shows his talent and thematic preoccupations in embryo. The Rat Trap is the story of a female novelist whose personality and creativity are stifled by marriage to a less talented man, concealing radical social ideas beneath brittle humour.
The cut-glass aphorisms are here — “If you make one more epigram, Olive, I shall break something,” our heroine Sheila says at one point. But the script has been finessed and “reimagined” by Bill Rosenfield, in a way that “Coward might have done at some later date”, he claims. The resulting work, directed by Kirsty Patrick Ward at Park Theatre, is more than a mere curiosity, less than wholly satisfying.
