Writer: Noël Coward
Director: Michael Longhurst
Noël Coward’s comedies are often mischaracterised as light fare, ripe for lampooning – little but dinner jackets, cigarette holders, stiff upper lips and acerbic quips. In truth, they are more about taking that archetype and showing the realities beneath.
Private Lives is the apotheosis of that approach. In the first act, the comedy of a divorced couple discovering that they are each honeymooning with their second spouses on adjoining balconies plays out as pure farce. It is only when they reunite and attempt to rekindle their relationship that their similarly self-destructive behaviours resurface.
Director Michael Longhurst revels in the darkness a little too much. Under his eye, Stephen Mangan’s Elyot reveals a side to his demeanour that is not just cutting but visceral. What might otherwise be played as humorous, if demeaning, joshing to his new bride Sibyl (Laura Carmichael) is delivered with a snap to full-on, vicious abuse. Rachael Stirling is every bit his equal as his sparring partner Amanda, imperious and sightly frustrated with her kind-but-dull new husband, Sargon Yelda’s Victor.
In the first act, the couples are confined to a pair of balconies above the stage, which designer Hildegard Bechtler populates with the furniture for Acts II and III, draped in blue silk dust sheets to give a not-completely-successful impression of the couples’ sea view. The structure of the staging cages in both Mangan and Stirling, their pacing around each other confined to verbal barbs.
The physical blows come later. As Elyot and Amanda abscond to the latter’s Paris flat, Bechtler’s dust sheets removed, the couple cycle between soppy romantic cuddling and ever-escalating acts of violence. No longer confined, the verbal attacks turn physical. Records and glasses are smashed, voices raised, and slaps resound around the Donmar’s small space. The intimacy of the venue increases the effect of the physical abuse all the more; as Mangan pulls Stirling around the apartment by her hair, we are in there with them.
As a means of showing that darkness under the upper-class veneer of which Coward was so adept at writing, it is brutally effective. The difficulty is that it makes the cycles of behaviour, the instant rapprochement between the warring duo as they revert to comedic quips, much less believable.
In many ways, Coward’s script has aged. Not only are there lines which modern eyes and ears rightly perceive as racist or sexist, but the very notion of an abusive relationship being the backbone of a comedy lands very differently today. Longhurst’s approach may well treat the abusive power play between Elyot and Amanda in a more honest light. But such attempts to emphasise the darkness struggle to fit into the deft lightness of Coward’s dialogue.
Mangan is great as both comedic fop and brutal sadist, even if the transitions between don’t always come off. The other three principals have less range to play with. Stirling never displays quite the same versatility as her acting partner, while Carmichael and Yelda do their best with characters that are a long way from Coward’s most well-defined roles.
Private Lives ends with the cycle repeating again, Elyot and Amanda sneaking away while Sibyl and Victor engage in their own violent rage. It is a sign that, if one or other of the newly-married couples had walked away from the hotel in Act I, the cycle could have been broken. But the ending only works if we are sufficiently invested in the comedy of abuse: by stripping that away, Longhurst robs Coward’s play of its true power.
Continues until 27 May 2023
The Reviews Hub Score
Brutally dark
