Liaison is a date with destiny

Financial Times
8th October 2001

Alastair Macaulay

Together again! In the 1980s, Lindsay Duncan and Alan Rickman made a classic pair in Christopher Hampton's stage adaptation of Les Liaisons dangereuses. Noble, witty, erotic, doomed. So now, when they play Amanda and Elyot in Noel Coward's Private Lives - the classic divorced couple who no sooner meet again than they realise that they never ceased being in love with each other - it feels as if this were a date with destiny. Howard Davies directed them in Les Liaisons; he directs them again here; and Hampton has written the programme note. Even if they were wrong for the play, you can feel that the whole of the West End wants this partnership in this play. But they're not wrong.

They're revelatory. To watch their body language at every point is to believe the intimacy and experience that this Amanda and this Elyot share. And to hear them is better yet. They're revelatory because they've dared to reconceive that whole genre of performance style known as Noel Coward style. Coward without camp! What Coward caught - brilliantly - was the automatically theatrical, frequently insincere, cleverly quoteworthy, flippantly debonair delivery of the old English upper class ("Certain women should be struck regularly, like gongs"). But, delicious though that is and enduring in a certain notion of sophisticated Englishness, its cultivated artifice has always made Private Lives seem to be a glamorous lie. Duncan and Rickman, however, play it for real.

They're much the most grown-up people in the play, sexually charged, emotionally multi-faceted, painfully right for each other. They're elegant, funny, but they're not theatrical, and they're certainly not brittle. When they do flippant, it's a choice, not a need. With her usually pellucid diction (which irritates some people), Duncan in particular could do conventional Coward style - both staccato and marcato, the Gatling-gun patter technique - in her sleep. Here, however, she and Rickman utter a lot of the lines languidly, without public flourish, mezza voce - for once, as if the audience were not there, addressing each other at times with the inwardness that we usually reserve for the voice in our own heads, so that they truly seem the reconciled halves of one person.

Lines that usually just pass in the night fall into place, famous lines make new sense. There they are on the balcony talking of travel. "How was it?" she says with her voice soft but at its most grainy, covering deep emotion; "The world?" he replies, slowly and more grainily yet, looking at her as if this small talk was sheer automatic pilot while everything that mattered vibrated in the air between them.

Four faults. As the maid Louise, Alex Belcourt makes unnecessary physical jokes; John Leonard's mix of offstage noise is muddled; Peter Mumford lights Act Two as if there were only two light-sources when there are 12 different lamps on the stage; and the end of Act Two needs more pace and (in the famous fight) spontaneity. But Tim Hatley's set for Act One - an angled view of four storeys of the hotel - is so witty that it rightly wins a round of applause, Jenny Beavan's costumes are as good as the acting, and Adam Godley, as Victor, is as original and surprising as Duncan and Rickman. A bravissimo to Howard Davies for reconceiving Coward so gloriously, and another to Coward for being so beautifully reinterpretable. Just what the West End needs right now. Look back in laughter.

 

 

 

Copyright 2001 The Financial Times Limited