West End Theatre Series: Noël Coward's Private Lives - Review

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Sun 06 Apr 2014 - Sun 13 Apr 2014

The signs are there from the beginning, when the newly married couples emerge on the adjoining balconies of Antony Ward's elegant set. Amanda (played by Anna Chancellor) recoils as her new husband clasps her clumsily to his well-tailored corpulence. Elyot (Toby Stephens) accepts rather than desires his new wife's advances. Everything about these relationships are careful and considerate and controlled. And yet when Amanda and Elyot each discover their former partner again – though they present initially as alienated from each other - even that alienation is passionate, barely under control, and clearly much is simmering under the surface.

Noël Coward describes their new and about to be betrayed spouses as "ninepins, set up to be knocked down". And clearly they represent much that Coward detests – stability, conventionality, pretentiousness, stupidity – but Anna Louise Plowman and Antony Calf play them in a way which fleshes them out to be more than mere skittles in the path of passion's wrecking ball.

But it is Amanda and Elyot who dominate – unable to live with each other, unable to resist the longing which draws each to the other.

With less skilful actors, the lines could appear dated, or contrived. Not so in this production. Even an exchange of cigarettes becomes charged with sensuality, and we are drawn into the elemental desires which make Amanda and Elyot spurn conventional moral expectations as beneath their consideration.

They are passionately wrapped up in each other, one moment loving, another repulsed.

Those desires are for something more than union with their sexual partner, as seen in Amanda's reckless determination to lose herself in dance, even if, and perhaps because she knows it will drive Elyot over the edge into the violent scene where they break up their apartment, and come to blows.


Amanda and Elyot are in the control of forces which they do not understand, and cannot resist, but which they live with an intensity which makes mere existence seem mundane.

This is no Pollyanna world of happy endings, with love conquering all. Coward's world vision on the whole, is bleak.

The humour is often lacerating, and even if passion makes the passionate more alive than the passive and the conventional, it is on the whole more destructive than it is creative.

Behind it all there is the fear that convention and passion are both devices to ward off meaningless and mortality.

And the triumph of this production by Jonathon Kent is that it captures all of these complexities.

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!date 06/04/2014 -- 13/04/2014
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