Many thanks to the North East Wales Archives, Ruthin Branch and the Meredith Edwards Papers collection for this transcript from The Oxford Times. Thanks also to Oliver Houston for requesting access.
September 28, 1956
by C.H.H.
THE LADY KILLERS
A good many people at the New Theatre on Monday laughed a good deal at Roald Dahl’s “Your Loving Wife,” here before production in London. Having pointed that out, I have to confess that I was not among them.
I was amused at the outset by some of the near-Thurberish touches in this play about two “weary wives, who widowhood would win” but the joke of their efforts to rid themselves of their rich and appalling husbands, despite the difficulties they encounter, is spread too thin, and even the pleasure of watching (and hearing) Hermione Baddeley, Agnes Lauchlan and Joyce Barbour could not alter the fact that this is not a good play.
It seems unable to decide whether it is comedy or farce, and Mr Dahl appears to me to have robbed the piece of any chance of coming off effectively by providing the restive wives with quite the wrong sort of husbands. They must obviously be expendable, as these two are; but they should also, surely, be funny – perhaps not quite in the Robertson Hare manner, since no one would stand for the killing of Mr. Hare, but with a happy eccentricity which would leave one feeling not that they deserved to be murdered but that it wouldn’t make much difference to the poor dears, anyway. As it is, the twin-brother husbands of Maggie and Mary Honey are simply coarse curmudgeons, and they are played by Meredith Edwards on a snarling note which becomes merely tiresome.
There is, of course, pleasure to be got from the three murderous dames. Miss Baddeley, insidiously sowing the seed of murder and then coping with its problems, puts in some nice characteristic touches; Miss Lauchlan, with a happy speculative look in her eye, has some joyous moments; and Miss Barbour leaves us in no doubt about how her widowhood came to pass. But they need more to work with than this play provides.