Seduced by style

All the unlikely threesome of Agatha Christie, Noël Coward and Lord Mountbatten can have had common is an exotic Devon hotel. They are known to have visited it in the Twenties, though not together.

Stirred by this snippet of information Jeremy Kingston's imagination has run wild and witty in his brooding comedy of love and misunderstanding that draws this unlikely trio together then pushes them apart.

Mrs Christie appears uneasily alone and staying under the protection of a pseudonym, as if in dress rehearsal for her later nervous breakdown, while Coward and Mountbatten are amply accompanied.

The mood is delightfully rarefied. People of several sexual persuasions appear in Kevin Freeman's cream-and-pink art deco reception room and need little persuading. They speak in well-heeled, even stiletto tones: Coward's diction is not so much clipped as shorn.

Kingston's clever dialogue polishes innuendo until it sparkles. People exchange aphorisms. No one drops a cliché not even the sexy waiter (Rob Pomfret) who offers bons mots, cocktails and his lips to two grand, male guests.

Coward, played by over-mature Robert Forknall with a ridiculous floral buttonhole and a camp manner that is too hectic and hectoring, has David Peto's smooth Lordly lover, Tono, for amusement. Mountbatten, nervously poised weeks away from marriage to Edwina, keeps in tow J-Boy, a handsome nautical chum who may be more than just chummy and a signal of the future Supreme Military Commander's undercover bisexuality.

Kingston, a Times theatre critic as well as a playwright, concocts a plot more contrived and less lucid than his fine dialogue. Caroline Wildi's Mrs Christie oddly warns Hywel John's stiff, pompous Mountbatten about the dangers of his marrying and not being true to himself, while he urges upon her a new form of detective-story writing. Coward, who takes a lofty view of other love-lives, finds he has been taken for a ride.

The plot-lines in Robert Gillespie's production are scrambled, but the atmospheric comedy of repartee and ambivalence seduces.

Until 3 October. Information: 020 7704 6665.

Making Dickie Happy