Fine vintage

A beautiful crumbling theatre in Notting Hill is under threat. The Coronet, which bills itself as the Print Room, faces the menace of renovation. The lovely rambling building has the tumbledown air of an abandoned Romanian palace. The raised stage sits opposite the dress circle of a former cinema and the auditorium, steeply raked, is bounded by a parapet decorated with plaster reliefs of scarred mermaids and broken-winged angels. A modern design team is bound to strip out all this ramshackle charm. The ragged, gloomy corridors, scented with damp brick dust, will be rationalised into glistening avenues of spotlit perfection. And the weird and ungainly bar area will become a money trap where cocktails worth 50 pence are sold for 12 quid by scowling waiters who think they’re Jimi Hendrix. Let’s hope the funding fails.

The vintage space has a vintage play, Five Finger Exercise, written in 1958 by Peter Shaffer who later created Equus and Amadeus. It’s an autobiographical piece, set in East Anglia, that introduces us to the prosperous, unstable Harrington family. The budget isn’t quite up to the grandeur required by the script. The two-tier stage is composed of scout-hut floorboards resting creakily on scaffolding poles. Centrally, there’s a sort of fire-escape arrangement to represent the staircase of a Suffolk country house. And the bedrooms are fitted with barn doors. But the costumes are good, the casting is strong, and the acting is high calibre.

Lucy Cohu, whose physique approaches the absolute zenith of female allure, delivers a bravura performance as Louise, the pretentious, frustrated, kind-hearted matriarch who secretly dreams of an affair with the young German tutor, Walter. Her humourless husband is an effusive dullard, a self-made bore who haunts the golf club with his boastful pomposity and who wants his oversensitive son to join him in the furniture trade making de-luxe tat for pretentious commuters.