Review: PRIVATE LIVES, Donmar Warehouse

A quick glance at Theatre Record (the UK's listing of listings) reveals that this is the 23rd production they note since the turn of the century - not bad for a play that is seven years short of its centenary. Michael Longhurst's production makes it easy to see why it should be so popular - and also presents a good argument for why it should not.

Elyot and Sibyl are half-bickering, half-canoodling on the terrace of a Deauville hotel on honeymoon in twilight of the Roaring Twenties. He's wealthy, older and a little tetchy; she's pretty, bimbo-ish and a little insecure. Wouldn't you know it, on the very next balcony, his ex-wife, Amanda, pitches up - to their mutual horror. She has her new spouse in tow and their relationship has many of the same flaws already bubbling to the surface. Well, you won't need all three guesses to divine what happens next.

Stephen Mangan and Rachael Stirling have a lot of fun with the couple who can't live with (and can't live without) each other, giving full value to Noel Coward's dialogue that retains much of its sparkle. They look good too, with designer, Hildegard Bechtler getting the bias-cut dresses just so for the women and the casual tweeds right for the men on a set that mines the Art Deco aesthetic beautifully.

Laura Carmichael and Sargon Yelda fare less well as the abandoned new spouses, Sibyl and Victor, their roles underwritten and their laughs of the 'at' rather than 'with' variety - were this an extended sketch in The Two Ronnies from 1974, they'd be labelled as crude stereotypes. When Faoileann Cunningham isn't provoking an intermezzo contretemps with fellow musician, Harry Napier, she's stealing the show in a fine cameo as the disdainful Parisian maid, Louise. I can't have been alone in feeling sympathy for her having to clean up after these upper class twits.

And that brief appearance told me a little about the play. For all the pleasure to be taken in the wit, in the craft, in the confidence of the writing and performances, the alternating protagonists / antagonists - Elyot and Amanda - are more like bratty kids than adults in middle age. Sure we all know relationships like this exist, but they're hard to live with on the inside and just as hard on the outside. The egoism wears you down, for all the smartarse appeals to flippancy as the only suitable response to a mad and maddening world. It's all rather too adolescent by the end, the jokes drowning in a sea of entitlement.

That said, it gets its fair share of laughs and comedy and cruelty often march hand-in-hand. But sometimes they do fall out of step.

While a woman breaking a record over a man's head can still catch a Tom and Jerry vibe, a man hitting a woman feels taboo these days and the frisson that descended on the room suggested I was not alone in that judgement. The script calls for violence and we're hardly in doubt that Elyot and Amanda's passions were manifested in every kind of physical interaction, but, after so many productions and at a venue with the resources and talent available to this one, perhaps the challenge of telling the story in a way more in tune with our times was not embraced as much as it might have been. Nobody wants to make Coward cuddly - he wasn't, and would hate to be so - but need we preserve quite so much of the abhorrent?

Long after I've forgotten the sting of the insults and the dazzling repartee, I'll remember the slap of the hand. I'm not sure that was the intent of anyone, but there it is.

Private Lives at The Donmar Warehouse until 27 May

Photo Credit: Marc Brenner

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