Marital strife fails acid test

Times  5th October 2001

BY BENEDICT NIGHTINGALE

Private Lives
Albery, London  

TWO violent acids bubbling in a nasty matrimonial bottle. That’s how Amanda and Elyot describe their failed marriage when they find themselves in the same hotel but honeymooning with fresh spouses at the opening of Noël Coward’s Private Lives. But at times last night I felt they’d undergone a chemical change. It was more a case of two alkalines lying pretty doggo.
That’s a pity, because this was the first time Alan Rickman and Lindsay Duncan had been together on stage since they chilled us in Les Liaisons Dangereuses 20 years ago and hopes were high. In fact, Howard Davies’s production, though often amusing, is relatively so downbeat that maybe it’s intentional. Here’s the elegiac tale of two people who have spent five years apart, made emotional compromises, feel rather older.

All right, they stage a bit of a fight after they’ve scarpered from the Riviera to Paris. Tempers fray, cushions fly, a head gets banged. But the scene lacks the gathering ferocity Juliet Stevenson and Anton Lesser put into it in their underrated partnership at the National in 1999. These two don’t make us feel, as they must, that the one thing they find harder than living apart is living together.

Surely the stakes should be higher. But Rickman in particular finds excitement hard to generate nowadays. He reminds me of Eeyore with a fine profile, not least when he’s prowling the stage exuding existential melancholy.

Duncan fares better, but not a lot. Her Amanda, it seems, is a woman who has made up her mind to settle for second best, only to find an old emotional addiction or allergy uncomfortably stirring.

Still, their first love scene has the quiet tenderness Coward wanted.

And they aren’t upstaged by their new spouses, for the usually excellent Emma Fielding and Adam Godley seem ill at ease in their roles. But let me add that last night’s audience laughed often and even applauded Tim Hatley’s hotel balcony and posh-Paris sets. They at least were full-bodied enough to deserve it.

 

 

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