Variety, Oct 15, 2001PRIVATE LIVES. (Review) MATT WOLF
Directed by Howard Davies. Sets, Tim Hatley; costumes,
Jenny Beavan; lighting,
Peter Mumford; music, Paddy Cunneen; sound, John
Leonard; fight director, Terry King; choreography, Quinny
Sacks. Opened, reviewed Oct. 4, 2001. Running time: 2
HOURS, 25 MIN.
Elyot Alan Rickman
Amanda Lindsay Duncan
Victor Adam Godley
Sibyl Emma Fielding
Louise Alex Belcourt
There's scarcely a more quotable comedy
in the English language than "Private
Lives," so the first thing to be said about
Howard Davies' glorious West End
reclamation of Noel Coward's perennially
popular play is how piercing its silences
turn out to be. That's not to suggest
Davies has performed a Pinteresque
conjuring act on Coward, even if the
director is in every way blessed to have as
his leading lady Lindsay Duncan, whose
shimmering allure suits Coward's barbs as fully as it does a
Harold Pinter pause. What sets this apart from any "Private
Lives" I've seen -- a misconceived National Theater revival
two years ago included -- is a collective understanding of
the ache that underlies the badinage, with the
once-married Amanda (played by Duncan) and Elyot (Alan
Rickman) trading banter to hide mutually heaving hearts.
The show gets its requisite laughs -- Rickman finds one in
the word "escape" -- while revealing itself in an altogether
different hue whereby hate is inextricably linked to love
and sorrow shadows even the cleverest of quips.
The shift in affect comes from nothing beyond a willingness
to start from the text, not from any received notion of
Coward-style posturing and camp. The result is a comedy
played for real, for a change, that effects transformations
large and small. For instance, Elyot's new wife, Sibyl,
usually (and often memorably) emerges as the butt of some
of Coward's crueler jokes. On this occasion, Emma Fielding
re-evaluates the play's primary figure of fun not as a
dimwit but as a sensible, bright-eyed bride brought low by
a new husband unused to her brand of seriousness --
especially when confronted across a Deauville balcony by
his ex-wife, Amanda, for whom Elyot still lies emotionally in
wait. (That hotel is itself worth the price of admission,
designer Tim Hatley's narrowing facade a witty Gaudi-style
wedding cake of a building displaced to the south of
France.)
Given the scenario, what can the discarded Sibyl and Victor
(Adam Godley) -- Amanda's latest amorous recruit -- do
beyond look on in disbelief, Godley's perf extending the
luxury casting with a grinning eagerness that is itself
capable of going sour? In context, it's scant surprise that
the play's subsidiary pair here come off as a debased
version of Amanda and Elyot, with Sibyl and Victor
enmeshed in an enmity all their own, leaving the leads time
to sneak away in the best Coward tradition. That the
younger duo clearly are fated to repeat the pattern of their
elders -- albeit on a less exalted scale -- reminds one once
again of the ways in which "Private Lives" can be seen to
anticipate "Who's Afraid of Virginia Woolf?," another play
about two couples, gamesmanship and the unforgiving
seesaw between desire and despair.
Amanda and Elyot's reunion also reunites Duncan and
Rickman, who partnered to career-making effect under
Davies' direction on "Les Liaisons Dangereuses," which
earned Tony noms for all three in its 1987 Broadway stand.
Since then, Rickman has had a rough time of it onstage,
and it's fair to guess his heavy-lidded, faintly languorous
Elyot won't be to everyone's taste. On the other hand, that
basset-hound demeanor from the outset hints at the
wistfulness that here gets folded in beneath the jibes, with
Rickman possessing the "shifty eyes" ascribed to Elyot by
Sibyl's mother. And when the actor takes to the piano to
sing "If Love Were All," his voice cracking with feelings that
dare not speak their name, the character's waspish
petulance is redefined as a defense against pain: For the
"two violent acids" that are Amanda and Elyot, love and
war are one.
Duncan, in turn, has been a stranger to Coward, which
seems astonishing in light of her intuitive hold over the
necessary sophistication -- Amanda, we hear, is "jagged"
with the stuff -- that is both elegant and eloquent at once.
The fissures in her new marriage showing already (would a
heroine so resistant to normalcy really want a companion
as boringly smiley as Victor?), Duncan's Amanda brings
down the house locking eyes for the first time in five years
with Elyot, a slow grin spreading across her face. It's not
long, however, before delight has given way to a newly
awakened awareness of the damage wrought by passion,
which must itself be set against the loneliness of life spent
with Victor. Amanda and Elyot walk a fine and poignant
line, you realize, between love and loss, their epigrammatic
ease a heartbeat away from a broken heart.
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