REVIEW PRIVATE LIVES

Time Out

10th October 2001
Brian Logan

Albery Theatre, London

If ever there was an Identikit West End hit, it's this. Howard Davies has revived Noel Coward's comedy of love among the monied classes with two marquee names at the top of their game. As the divorcees who five years later find themselves in adjacent hotel suits on their respective honeymoons, Alan Rickman and Lindsay Duncan pitch in estimable comic performances. Rickman comes into his own when Elliott (sic) is revealed as a moral coward and maestro of the withering put-down. He wrings the dialogue for every drop of overindulgent self pity, and releases Elliott's flashes of invective and coiled spite. Duncan's Amanda shows her hand less often: she has a series of beguiling mechanisms - now smouldering sophistication, now breezy detachment and a devastating smile - to keep life at a safe distance. In their hands, and those of Emma Fielding and Adam Godley as their hapless spouses, Coward's dialogue trips from the stage. It is a masterclass in wit.

But not in drama. Act One, when Amanda and Elliott meet and elope, crackles with romantic charge. There are powerful myths at play here - of the love that's bigger than both of us; of the love that must not speak it's name. It's a thrilling scene of buttoned -down passion. We feel it's urgent that these characters get back together. But once they do, the play has nowhere to go. In Amanda's apartment - one of two garish sets by Tim Hatley - the pair love then infuriate one another. But Rickman and Duncan don't seem to take the pair's fights seriously. The first act's pain and ardour dissipates into bloodless light comedy. I stopped believing that the decisions these characters made would have any bearing on their emotional well- being whatsoever.

 

 

Copyright 2001 Time Out Publications Ltd