FASCINATION with the lifestyles of the idle rich shows no sign of abating in our present-day world of gloom and doom, austerity and all the other assorted miseries.


This undoubtedly explains the public’s apparently insatiable appetite for lost world dramas such as Downton, Upstairs, Downstairs and the endless nostalgia daily pumping out of the Yesterday channel.


Playwright Noel Coward new a thing or two about what made the ordinary person tick when it came to lusting after the impossibly unattainable.
And that is why his writings continue to strike such a resounding chord with today’s audiences.


Volcano was never performed in its creator’s lifetime. The theme is, unsurprisingly, pure vintage Coward – the dramas and intrigues of the pampered, moneyed classes and their relatively surreal existences.
Yet like Downton  such themes are totally addictive.


Director Roy Marsden does this newly-discovered work proud, succinctly interpreting a world of libations once the sun’s over the yardarm, dinner parties… and the obligatory seduction of other people’s spouses.


So when not-so-merry widow Adela Shelley (Jenny Seagrove) finds herself being wooed by the dashing Guy Littleton (Jason Durr), the scene appears set for a bit of a Caribbean-style canoodling that can come to only one conclusion.


However, the course of illicit love never runs smooth. So when Guy’s shrewish better half Melissa (Dawn Steele) decides to do something about these rum goings-on, and sails in with all cannons blazing, you might be forgiven for thinking that’s the end of this particular bit of hanky-panky behind the coconut palms.


Yet it’s only the beginning of a drama in which where there are far more hidden skeletons than buried treasure. And one by one, they emerge, like the phantoms in a Johnny Depp pirates movie.


A super chaste Seagrove and bitch queen Steele are perfectly partnered as the warring women, while the chocolate-smooth Durr expands all the skills he honed as Heartbeat’s Adensfield heart-throb to present an entirely convincing philanderer.


Finty Williams’s Grizelda Craigie bubbles better than the best Bollinger, while Perdita Avery as love-starved Ellen Danbury even out-smoulders all that lava which is no doubt on its way.


Meanwhile, Robin Sebastian and Tim Daish maintain a superb, unflinchingly blokish presence as Robin Craigie and Keith Danbury respectively.


But all the time, a different and more deadly type of cataclysm is bubbling away deep in the bowels of the earth, poised to spill over into everyone’s lives and change them forever…


Volcano runs until Saturday, August 11.