Honouring the classic text while playing with and observing modern opinions
Entering the Ambassador’s Theatre on a sweltering Tuesday night, the excitement for this hotly-anticipated production of Noël Coward’s classic comedy was palpable. Private Lives is a 1930s comedy in three acts. Passion, romance, anger, and lust all intertwine in Coward’s ultimate battle of the sexes as recent divorcees, Amanda and Elyot, bump into one another inadvertently on a hotel balcony after booking two rooms, door-to-door, on their respective honeymoons with their new lovers, Victor and Sybil. Amanda and Elyot are forced to face their true feelings for each other. Realising they have made a mistake leaving each other, they attempt to escape their mismatched partners. They succeed… for a bit.
Enter Act Two. After the interval, the audience was transported to a grandiose bedroom furnished with satin curtains, stylish furniture, and burgundy hues, the colours adding to the passion and fire exuding from the exes, as Amanda and Elyot find themselves, albeit briefly, falling in love all over again. How long can this honeymoon period last? Apparently, not very long, as before they can help themselves, they are bickering again. The bickering turns to bellowing and quickly turns physical; the couple begins to scrap with Amanda being the first one to initiate, by comically smashing a record over her divorced husband’s head, which was received with rapturous laughter. The fight sequence was potentially a little sloppy and felt somewhere between slapstick and realism; maybe more of a stylistic decision had to be made here. The woman began the fight; did this make it more digestible? Probably. It posed the question: if Elyot had made the first offer, how would this have lain within the psyche of a modern audience?
Chaos further ensues in Act Three when the Comedy of Errors-esque confrontation occurs, as the partners they left behind, Sybil and Victor, arrive at their hotel room. The tension is oozing as Nigel Havers and Dugald Bruce-Lockart try to turn to bravado and attempt to fight out the feelings they are struggling to process, whilst the women, Patricia Hodge and Natalie Walter, leave to gossip… of course! The tension swells as Victor and Sybil’s argument comes to a boiling point. The play ends beautifully. Havers and Hodge, observing the argument with fantastic physical comedy, their heads turning on each line – as if they were watching Djokovic at Wimbledon – take their chance to sneak out of the door to freedom while the stilted lovers are consumed with their quarrel.
Coward’s snappy and witty dialogue is tremendous, and the vocal richness and dexterity all actors displayed helped serve the text beautifully. The actors all found a fantastic playfulness with each other. It felt dangerous, and that is when theatre is at its best: Actors challenging each other, taunting each other, teasing each other. For a Press Night performance, it felt completely alive and full of spark whilst also being tremendously well rehearsed, as if it was its 100th performance.
The ironic tinge to the comedy helped carry the innate sadness that was evidently lurking below the surface of all the characters. Elyot and Amanda crave excitement. They are bored, dissatisfied, confused.
The classic tools of comedy were honoured: the power of three, rhyming, physical comedy, all came together, and are a testament to the brilliant direction from Christopher Luscombe.
The couples had a fantastic back-and-forth and paced the dialogue well, clipping through most of it, which enabled the actors to lean into the silences when they did appear, as they were truly earned.
The music served as a nice break from the talking and transported us further to the time period. Hodge’s voice rang through the theatre and was a treat to listen to.
Putting Noël Coward’s work on a stage in modern-day London does pose the question: Do modern audiences still want/need to see rich white people bickering about rich white people’s problems? Well, if you’d asked me before watching, my response would have been: probably not. However, despite this piece being written in the 1930s, a lot of the conversations, specifically dealing with themes of sexism and gender roles, still ring sadly true. With terms like gaslighting part of our everyday conversations, Elyot understatedly announcing, “You’ve worked yourself up to a state that only exists in your mind” was received with quiet sighs, especially from the female identifying members of the audience, who have undoubtedly heard a similar quote said to them at some point in their lives. This happened multiple times over the course of the evening and convinced me that this production does have a place on our West End, as it is honouring the classic text while playing and observing the opinions shared by most members of a modern audience when it comes to the expectations, trials, and tribulations experienced by the respective genders.
Private vs Public: well, in this case, the audience are a fly on the wall in the conversations had by the upper class in 1930s Britain. You almost feel you shouldn’t be there. But I was glad I was.
Review by Carla Mcpherson