Five Star Treatments

Mail on Sunday  7th October 2001

BY GEORGINA BROWN

Private Lives
Albery, London 

*****

This week, a revelation. Noel Coward's miraculously constructed comedy Private Lives, as I've never seen it. No period posturing with cigarette holders, no cut glass accents, no skidding across a shiny, scintilating surface, but deep, penetrating insight into the relationship between middle aged lovers who can't live together and can't live apart.

Lindsay Duncan and Alan Rickman are sensationally good as Amanda and Elyot, the divorced couple who meet on the balcony of the hotel where each is honeymooning with a new spouse.

The electricity with crackled between these two in Les Liaisons Dangereuses is here more highly charges, more explosive than ever. Now older, sexier, more sophisticated, more subtle, under the assured direction of the great Howard Davies, they shake all the artifice from Cowards's familiar lines and bring the play to a fiery, funny, profoundly felt, startling spontaneous life.

Their shared jokes and wit, their way of touching one another with easy familiarity, their ravenous desire for one another, the intimacy of their irritation, the ferosity of their fighting, brilliantly define a dependancy which cannot be destroyed or denied.

Emma Fielding and Adam Godley provide the perfect complement as the starchy, dull and decent new spouses.

A brilliantly lit, powerfully illuminating, definative revival. Book Immediately.

 

 

 

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