Star Quality

Star Quality is a satire on the artist’s ego and the process of creativity. The painstaking processes of producing West End theatre are seen through the insidious backbiting and disharmony of the backstage - a world away from the pristine grandeur of opening night.

Noel Coward’s script is adapted by Christopher Luscombe and directed by Joe Harmston who has Golden Globe Winner, Amanda Donohoe at hand in her performance of grand dame, Lorraine Barrie. Donohoe portrays a domineering exterior whilst evoking a soft underbelly.

Obsequious niceties of first day rehearsals are exchanged for brutal honesty through Barrie’s fastidiousness and the ensuing fraught relations between the cast culminate in a fierce conflict between ‘director’ (Daniel Cassey) and his lead role. Barrie’s
continuous legitimising of her maid's on-set presence and the abundant stroppy dressing room tantrums convincingly evoke an unspoken and assumed hierarchy. Amidst this chaos, the writer (Bob Saul) is a passive observer whose imploring for cohesion is thus rendered comic and tragic: ‘We’re putting on a play, not fighting a bloody war’.

Star Quality succeeds through exposing the veneer of glamour attached to theatre: the director is frustrated and a failed artist; his PA – zealously enacted by Anthony Houghton - denotes his ‘master’ as unable to write a single page of creativity. Moreover, Gay Soper’s droll maid divulges Barrie’s dependence on obtaining the part to keep the wolf from the door.

The most engaging theme focuses on how the purity of the artist’s vision is corrupted by the dog-eat-dog world of show business. However, the allegorisation that results from the world and its characters' satirical exposition makes them difficult to invest in.

Hearing two ladies at the interval bemoan the bare staging of act one’s behind-the-scenes rehearsals missed the point of what Star Quality offers: it lifts the veil of opulence associated with theatre to realistically portray the morally void aspects of theatre.

Toes are trodden on and all barriers are broken yet Lorraine Barrie transcends all to deliver a performance that is proportionate in its success to that of Star Quality as a whole.