Design for staging Noel Coward plays

Noel Coward's "Design for Living" is both effervescent and deep, farcical and risque`, and leaves the audience very very pleased, indeed.  How come, then, we left the theater feeling distinctly cheated?

In the United States, there is a tradition of performing British plays with actors speaking with British accent.  Personally, I think it is more than stupid: the accents often don't match, with unintended comical consequences. Also, some just cannot fully master the true British pronounciation at all and sound silly.  Above all, most actors are trying too hard to produce that upper class British accent and end up paying far more attention to that than to actually delivering the lines.  And, I must say honestly, on many an occasion male actors end up sounding like flamers.  That is exactly what happened at this unfortunate production that we were unlucky to attend.

If both male leads are flamers, who would believe that their ardor for the girl is so ardent that they would forget all propriety and all bonds of friendship and proceed to fall into bed with her?

Of course, one of the points Coward wanted to make in that delicious comedy is that some friendships are different from others, and that propriety is for bourgeousie.  You can make the two men love and shag the girl and also love and shag each other, but let's, please, have some subtlety.  Subtlety and wicked understatement are Noel Coward trademarks, after all.

If speaking with a fake British accent is not bad enough, there is also a tradition to actually imitate Noel Coward when performing the role of Leo.  This was an obviously auto-biographical character, as his occupation (successful playwright) and his name (an inverted Noel) suggest.  Coward himself played the role on Broadway when the play opened.  Noel Coward was known for an extremely enunciated way of speaking and for stressing the consonants just so.  Whenever I hear this Noel-speake in a theater, I cringe.  The very simple and very moving reason for that elaborate elocution was that Coward's mother was nearly deaf.  The devoted son wanted Mum to always understand what he was saying off the stage and on.