Archives for November 18, 2011

In today’s Wall Street Journal I review the Broadway revival of Private Lives. Here’s an excerpt.
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Throughout most of his life, Noël Coward was widely regarded as a theatrical lightweight, albeit a brilliant one. Not until the ’60s did the critics start to figure out that “Private Lives,” his masterpiece, was something more than (in his own ironically self-deprecating words) “a reasonably well-constructed duologue for two experienced performers, with a couple of extra puppets thrown in to assist the plot and to provide contrast.” Needless to say, Coward knew better, and now so do we. Yes, “Private Lives” is a comedy–one of the funniest ever written–but beneath its slapstick lunacy and impish repartee, it preaches a stealthy sermon about hypocrisy that is as much to the point today as it was in 1930. Elyot, the playwright’s fictional alter ego, gets right to the heart of the matter when he tells Amanda, his ex-spouse and companion in adultery, to laugh at “the futile moralists who try to make life unbearable….Flippancy brings out the acid in their damned sweetness and light.” Indeed it does, and you don’t have to be an anarchist to smile wickedly as Coward’s characters poke bruising fun at all the censorious prigs, both moral and political, who talk a better game than they play.
Such artful tutorials deserve to be seen regularly. Alas, it’s been nine years since “Private Lives” was last performed on Broadway, but that production, which starred Lindsay Duncan and Alan Rickman, was so good that playgoers are still buzzing about it. Not since then has there been a first-rate big-ticket Coward revival in New York, which explains part of the general interest in the new “Private Lives” that just sailed in from London by way of Toronto. Most of it, though, arises from the onstage presence of Kim Cattrall, lately and famously of “Sex in the City,” who plays Amanda. In New York that may sound like stunt casting of the worst kind, but Ms. Cattrall is well known in England as a serious stage actress. She is not, however, an ideal Amanda…
For starters, Ms. Cattrall lacks the silken lightness of touch necessary to play Amanda convincingly. Paul Gross, her Elyot, has it in abundance, which is why he gets most of the laughs. Not only does he know how to flick off his lines with sly casualness, but he does it without imitating Coward’s style of acting, which makes his performance all the more effective. He and Ms. Cattrall have terrific onstage chemistry, and their romantic scenes couldn’t be sexier, but whenever the tone of “Private Lives” turns comic, her overemphatic, inadequately varied delivery undercuts the humor.
Just as important, Ms. Cattrall, who makes no secret of being 55, has been cast as a thirtyish beauty in a play about the “bright young things” of whom Coward himself was a prime example. When “Private Lives” opened in 1930, he was 30 and Gertrude Lawrence, his co-star, was 32, and their self-evident youth was central to the play’s effect. Ms. Cattrall, to be sure, looks gorgeous, but she doesn’t look 30, and the fact that the play has been recast to accommodate her age–Mr. Gross is 52–distorts it still further…
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Read the whole thing here.
Noël Coward and Gertrude Lawrence in an excerpt from the balcony scene of Private Lives, recorded in 1930. (The video has no relation to the recording!)

UPDATE: To hear Gertrude Lawrence and Orson Welles in a heavily abridged 1939 Campbell Playhouse radio adaptation of Private Lives, go here.

“Surely that little pseudo-gothic church on Broadway, hidden amongst the skyscrapers, is symbolic of the age! On the whole face of the globe the civilization that has conquered it has failed to build a temple or a tomb.”
André Malraux, Voices of Silence