HIGH SOCIETY. Barbican EC2

A SWELL PARTY, EVENTUALLY We “Call the Midwife” fans all suspected there was more pizazz to nurse Trixie than bicycling round Poplar in the 1950s, and indeed Helen George always was a dead classy, RAM- trained musical-theatre professional. In the vast dour Barbican hall she’s a golden breeze of a presence, as happy in showy absurdities as in the famous plaintive beauty of “True Love” . A number which, by the way, she delivers not in a boat like Grace Kelly but sprawled with Julian Ovenden’s Dexter on the cold marble floor of the oddly bleak mansion set. But fair enough: Helen George is more of a Marilyn Monroe than an ic-queen Kelly. Her seductiveness is all warm mischief and rueful wit., her acting full of truth: after her magnificent drunken scene with Freddie Fox’s Mike she sings Porter’s fabulous lines about “wrong time, wrong place, wrong face” and there’s a fine, sad stillness there alongside the nonsense. This is, despite the wonderfulness of any Cole Porter musical, quite the…