This frothy, misguided Private Lives drains Coward of his bite, swaps elegance for farce, and ultimately reduces a great play to flat, joyless bickering.Rating
Ok
Officer, I’d like to report a crime. Noël Coward has been robbed. His trademark darkly comic, cold-hearted cynicism is missing from the Rose Theatre Kingston’s production of Private Lives, stolen by creative choices that, instead, prioritise shallow fun and frippery.
Director Tanuja Amarasuriya’s take on Coward’s perennial hit is, I’m sad to report, hard to care about and fatally loses momentum as it progresses. I suspect Amarasuriya turned away from Private Lives’ infamous barbs of casual cruelty to attract new audiences to a play some find challenging. She says as much in her programme notes. Admirable in theory, but in reality, this thinking has led to errors in judgment that the show never really recovers from. If you’re not portraying the exquisite pain of loving the wrong person in a restricted, controlled high-society world, then you’ve missed the point. If everything is unfiltered, unrestrained jolly japes, all you’re really left with is broad caricatures going through the motions. This matters because Noël Coward was many things, alongside being the most popular playwright of the early 20th Century – a closeted gay man, a ruthless social climber, a Second World War propagandist, and an urbane cabaret artiste – but silly, flippant, and unserious? Oh my dears, quite definitely not. His peers knew him as The Master for a reason.
Act one feels sparse. The play’s famous luxurious hotel balconies are flattened in favour of twin sets of garden furniture. Direction is sparse, too. No grand sweeping gestures and little you’d call action. People stand. People sit. People talk. It’s all far too flat. Act Two at least introduces furniture and props, but they’re unfortunately more camp than sophisticated. There’s a jarring pair of pyjamas more reminiscent of sweaty 1960s sex comedy than 1930s elegance. There is also laboured, cartoonish, desperately unsexy choreography and lumpen fight direction to contend with that I’m afraid failed to register much beyond slightly embarrassed giggles.
The cast rattles through the words. I don’t remember many pauses, for dramatic effect or otherwise. Jokes and one-liners are ploughed through with little timing. As Elyot, Chirag Benedict Lobo’s boyish clowning makes it difficult to believe that the play’s women find him as dashingly sexually attractive as the plot demands. Pepter Lunkuse brings a degree of gravitas as Amanda, his first wife, but I longed for the mask to slip. We need at least a flash of vulnerability to feel invested in her choices. As the second wife, Sibyl, Sade Malone doesn’t have a huge amount to do, perhaps a bit of shouting. Ashley Gerlach’s Victor, Amanda’s flummoxed new husband, gets a lot of the laughs, but it speaks volumes that these tend to come from his physicality rather than any mastery of Coward’s quips. The final cast member is Jodie Cauresma, who opens the show with a song and then returns as a French maid with just five or six lines. For my money, she still manages to deliver a more grounded, real performance than any of her colleagues. Bravo.
As the story reaches its blackly comic conclusion, namely that the battle of the sexes is an eternal looping struggle, laughs have become few and far between. The decision to treat the source material so lightly has backfired. We simply don’t care who crawls out of the mess. It’s all been reduced to one-note, noisy quarrelling with nothing much of value at stake. It’s a weak finish to, I’m afraid, a weak show.
Written by Noël Coward
Directed by Tanuja Amarasuriya
Set & Costumes by Amy Jane Cook
Movement & Intimacy Direction by Jennifer Kay
Fight & Intimacy Direction by Haruka Kuroda
Sound Design by Timothy X Atack
Lighting Design by Chris Davey
Private Lives plays at the Rose Theatre, Kingston until Saturday 25 October
