I have often wondered if actors ever truly stop performing off stage...or are they just honing a current role or auditioning for the next?

Noel Coward’s anti-hero Garry Essendine exposes the line between art and reality to be tainted and gossamer thin.

Essendine is a fading matinee idol who is a self-absorbed, arrogant, bullying misogynist... who deep down is just shallow!

By rights we should hate the narcissistic character in Coward’s Present Laughter (Marlowe Theatre, Canterbury until Saturday July 23).

But in the hands of the superb Samuel West he manages to make you feel empathy for someone who hates and craves the adoration of those around him in equal measure...never content, rarely fulfilled and always feeling the need to act.

Some believe that this 1930’s drawing room comedy was autobiographical but I think it was Coward in a hall of mirrors creating grotesque caricatures for comic effect.

And the play has plenty of the playwright’s pithy one-liners, but this is somewhat tart humour..like sucking a lemon drop without the sherbet.

Sometimes you find yourself laughing, not at a joke, but at the absurd effrontery of Essendine self-delusions.

By his side is the not quite estranged wife Liz, ( Rebecca Johnson) and Garry’s long-suffering secretary Monica Reed.

Monica, played by one of the UK’s finest actresses, Phyllis Logan, and Liz keep Garry from being sucked through the vortex of his own swirling melodramatic life, which manages to pull in numerous starstruck lovers..who always end up in the spare bedroom!

Superficial paramours and friends come and go, abused and berated by Essendine but unable to turn off their spotlights as they shower him with adoration and promises of never-ending love.

It is an uneven plot which manages to hold together thanks to a fabulous cast who manage to wring a laugh out of every exchange.

Samuel West’s skill in exposing Essendine’s ugly personality flaws but layering it with such charm that you end up not condemning him but pitying the bleak and lonely future which awaits him.. not the African tour he is preparing for but ”alone with an apple and a good book”.

Around him are angry playwrights (played by Patrick Walshe McBride), betrayed friends Henry (Toby Longworth) and Morris (Jason Morrell), the butler (Martin Hancock) who all manage to keep this uneven comedy on an even keel.

Daisy Boulton’s lovesick debutante Daphne and Zoe Boyle’s brilliantly vampish Joanna – the only character who manages to get the better of Essendine.

And then there is Sally Tatum’s chain-smoking Swedish housekeeper, Miss Erikson – a kind of Ad Fab’s Patsy on amphetamines – who manages to steal every scene...utterly fab!

Coward once said he wrote the play because he wanted to provide himself with “a bravura part” ..well in the hands of the brilliant Sam West that legacy is still good.

Present Laughter is at the Marlowe Theatre in Canterbury until Saturday, July 23.

For details visit marlowetheatre.com