.home | art & architecture | books & cds | dance | destinations | film | opera | television | theater | archives 

Private Lives
by  Noël Coward

... Amongst the many events celebrating the centenary of Noël Coward's birth, the National Theatre's new production of his most successful play has been one of the most highly anticipated. It is the 1920's and divorcees Elyot and Amanda are honeymooning in the same French hotel with their new spouses, Sibyl and Victor. Inevitably they meet - they are, after all, staying in rooms with adjoining balconies - and so begins one of the most famous high comedies ever written. Realizing that they are made for each other, Elyot and Amanda abandon husband and wife without a backward glance and run away to Paris - before rediscovering just why they were unable to live together in the first place. While the play was treated remarkably lightly by the Lord Chamberlain - who had banned or cut many of Coward's other works - its story of charming but utterly amoral people was regarded as dangerously subversive and offensive by many when it was first produced in 1930.
    Philip Franks has his actors play the couple with a little more humanity and a little less archness than we are used to. However, his desire to humanize the characters does seem, at times, to work against the play. All is fine in the first Act where his approach makes their reunion unusually affecting as they reveal the passion for each other which lies beneath their superficial acidity. There is  much telling detail. Elyot's palpable disappointment in his new bride is evident from the outset - as is Amanda's wistfulness at the mere mention of her ex-husband.
    In Acts II and III - after they have abandoned their spouses and run off to hole up in Amanda's Paris atelier - things begin to go wrong. If Elyot and Amanda actually mean much of what they say to each other then they are quite monstrous and it becomes difficult to imagine that anybody would want to spend much time with them. There is certainly something sympathetic - and dramatically interesting - about two people so self-obsessed that, while clearly soul mates, they cannot manage to live together but I am not convinced that this was Coward's prime concern.
    Elyot and Amanda are always acting. They are the epitome of "camp" - if in doubt, strike a pose. It is tempting to look for the truth underneath all this but one must also ask, in the case of this consummately witty and entertaining play, how much "truth" there actually is. Surely Coward's main intent here is to employ - quite superbly - his talent to amuse?  The characters are two dimensional - Victor and Sibyl are middle class English cliches just as much as Elyot and Amanda are quintessential habitues of the cocktail hour who speak with all the archness of the 1920's beau monde. Certainly, camp is frequently used as a defense - as it almost certainly was by Coward, a gay artist living in a social climate still largely hostile to his sexuality - but it isn't always the case. It can also be used for humorous effect and the dialogue of Private Lives is probably the finest and most concentrated example of this ever produced. For all the conscious feyness of Anton Lesser's Elyot, these characters are avowedly heterosexual and their camp is much more a fashion accessory than a defense. In fact the play offers no evidence that they feel they have anything to be defensive about.
    In order for the play to work we must fall in love with Elyot and Amanda and root for them against the appalling wronged Victor and Sibyl. If too many of their bon mots begin to sound real then the audiences' affection starts to wear thin. If Elyot really believes that "some women should be struck regularly - like gongs," then he is cruel and a bully rather than just shallow and irreverent.  Franks makes the fight which ends Act II unusually violent. Perhaps he hopes that the fact that Juliet Stevenson is several inches taller than he co-star will somehow make up for his slapping her and
slamming a piano lid down on her fingers. It's funny and skillful - and more impressive than the traditional pillow fight - but still leaves a slightly bitter taste.
    For all its unusual tone, Frank's production is never less than perceptive in its attention to detail and, while other versions might elicit more laughter, there is no shortage of wit or elegance in the performances. Lesser and Stevenson are both highly impressive - he rather overdoes the effeminacy but both have impeccable timing and style. Her prematurely husky tones hint at a woman to whom polite debauchery is mother's milk. Dominic Rowan and Rebecca Saire offer excellent support. Saire comes into her own in the third act when her relish at - albeit briefly - besting Amanda is delicious. Rowan's Victor is superb, managing to be thunderously stolid and utterly bemused all at the same time. He also serves the subtleties of Coward's writing particularly well. His overuse of the word "sweet" with regard to Amanda - as if by saying it enough times he will actually achieve the impossible and make her so - indicates from the outset just how completely at sea he is in this marriage.                                                                                                                                                                                         ..                             .- Mark Jennett

(Engagement and tour completed 10/99.)