Noel Coward’s Private Lives
“Strange how potent cheap music can be”, says Elyot Chase in the opening scene of Noël Coward’s Private Lives, currently playing at the Gielgud Theatre, Shaftesbury Avenue. It could equally apply to the comedy of manners that so often is represented in plays about love-besotted relationships between strong characters. In that sense this play is part of a tradition in the English theatre, which stretches back to The Taming of the Shrew and forward to Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf, with references to Sheridan, Wilde and Shaw.
Beautifully staged and directed by Jonathan Kent and his team it is also wonderfully acted by Anna Chancellor as Amanda Prynne (Chancellor was “Duckface” from Four Weddings and a Funeral) and Toby Stephens as Elyot Chase, with great support from Anthony Calf, as Victor Prynne, and Anna-Louise Plowman, as Sibyl Chase.
The drama opens with a scene of two hotel balconies at the oh-so British resort of Deauville in Normandy, with one balcony linked to the Chase honeymoon suite and the other to the Prynne honeymoon suite. Unfortunately but surely not coincidentally one of the suites had also been Elyot’s and Amanda’s honeymoon suite five years previously before their marriage broke up in vicious quarrels and perhaps not quite criminal violence. We can only imagine how the two were drawn back to the same hotel and the same room for their second honeymoon.
There follow ludicrous scenes of embarrassment and forbidden titillation, with Coward using the story set in the present as an illumination of the five intervening years of passionate but turbulent marriage between Elyot and Amanda. It reaches a head as they come to the realisation that the very dull and uninspiring spouses that they are now linked to are completely unsuitable soulmates, for either of them and that the worst mistake that they had ever made was to divorce.
The scene moves to an expensive but bohemian flat in Paris and farcical scenes of love and confusion, of misunderstandings and of humour. Elyot can neither live with Amanda or without her, nor she with him. They are tracked down by their new spouses, who are beginning to find their mutual dullness more re-assuring than their legal spouse.
The play ends without any question answered. Are Elyot and Amanda going to get together? Probably yes but for how long? Can Sybil and Victor ever have enough passion to get it together? The play hints Yes, perhaps. Do any of the four of them have a job or work for a living? Clearly not a consideration for Coward.
So what is the point? These are the lives of the effortlessly rich. They are the jet-set of the age – a kind of decadent ocean-going liner class at the end of the Swinging Twenties, whilst most around them are sinking into the economic and political storms of the thirties.
Amidst the wit and humour of the play, and it is full of laughs both of the belly and the brain, this comedy uses the desperate difficulty of finding a life partner as a tragic plea to find purpose in a world not so dis-similar to our own. Why should we care? A legitimate question for today just as it was in the thirties but let’s hope we do not have to go through the same horrors to find the answer as that generation did.
Tony Belton
Tony Belton 