There is plenty to easily enjoy in Hawai'i Pacific University's production of "The Constant Wife" by W. Somerset Maugham. The costumes are fun, the dialogue is arch and witty, the acting is uniformly good and the plot takes a few interesting turns.

It's also impossible to take it all in without referencing back to the original context of this 80-year-old issue play disguised as a drawing-room comedy. The repeated double-checking back to the social and historical world of 1926 adds extra interest for a modern audience.

Although best remembered as a novelist ("Of Human Bondage"), Maugham, for a period, was a prolific playwright, compared for his epigrams to Oscar Wilde and for his social commentary to George Bernard Shaw. Both comparisons are amply illustrated in the current HPU production directed by Joyce Maltby, who's known for her careful, precise staging and her coterie casting.

In a blatant play on words, the play's central character of Constance Middleton (Bree Bumatai) is remarkably consistent, cool and self-possessed — despite the general knowledge among family and acquaintances that her wealthy surgeon husband is carrying on an affair with her best friend.

Indeed, Bumatai is so in control of the character that the audience may have its own belief that her ignorance is genuine, especially when she accepts the ardor of an old lover, yet composedly holds him at arm's length. However, when the affair is thrust into the open by the best friend's outraged husband, Constance begins to exercise her strongest quality in a new light.

It's at this point that the performances rather than the plot become the production's strong suit. The cast builds on that momentum, reaching full fruition in the last act.

Bumatai's Constance moves from simple social aplomb to expressing radical ideas. She says she's "tired of being a modern wife — a prostitute who doesn't deliver the goods" and that she wants economic freedom, as it is "the only one important." In a frank discussion with her husband about continuing a marriage of 20 years, she admits that love stopped after the first five. When she decides to embark on a six-week vacation with a former suitor, it's not because she loves him, but because she needs to experience again the feeling of being loved.

These frank, but heavy, thoughts are neatly balanced in the overall comedy by Rob Duval as the husband, who moves from being a stupid and misbehaving little boy to a hopelessly frustrated man unable to control his wife or to stop desiring her. Becky Maltby does nice supporting work as the frazzled and spoiled best friend and other woman.

Sylvia Hormann-Alper promotes an earlier generation's double standard as Constance's mother, whose own husband "was good, but he was stupid. The gods loved him and he died young." Patrick Torres does good work as the desperate former suitor and Gerald Altwies has a solid short scene as the jealous husband of the other woman.

The play has an attractive look, although we might wish set designer Karen Archibald had a bigger budget to make the apartment truly sumptuous. (Constance, after all, is respected for her interior decoration.) Peggy Krock's period costumes are coordinated to the hilt, with matching ensembles and cloche hats for the women and double-breasted suits and retro neckties for the men. One wonders, though, why Constance's mother is never fully accessorized with the hats, bags and gloves sported by the other women, when nothing in the dialogue suggests she has fewer resources.

The HPU production succeeds in taking us to another time and place, leaving us with at least one good, timeless line: If you're unwilling to share your partner's toothbrush, you know you're not really in love.

Joseph T. Rozmiarek has been reviewing theater performances in Hawai'i since 1973.