Private Lives, Noël Coward’s acid romantic comedy, opens with an irresistible conceit: Elyot and Amanda, divorced for five years after a tempestuous marriage, encounter each other by chance on the first night of their honeymoons with their new partners.
Their passion instantly reignites and they run away together, leaving their rejected spouses, the insipid Sybil and the very proper Victor to sort out the mess. Privileged, spoilt, neurotically damaged, Elyot and Amanda replay the violent disaster of their marriage in Amanda’s Parisian flat, destroying the furniture along the way.
Coward’s 1930s play is a celebration of the joys of irresponsible excess over the sober mores of repressive convention. “All the futile moralists who try to make life unbearable,” says Elyot. “Laugh at them. Be flippant. Laugh at everything, all their sacred shibboleths.”
It’s also Coward’s shot at the stifling stereotypes of sexual convention: perhaps what is most striking about Amanda (Nadine Garner) and Elyot (Leon Ford) is that they’re equals, in sexual appetite, violence and high camp carelessness. “It doesn't suit women to be promiscuous,” says Elyot during one of their bickerings. “It doesn't suit men for women to be promiscuous,” Amanda shoots back.
Victor and Sybil, the less stormy, perhaps more stable notions of love to which each of them almost flees, embody the conventions. Sybil (Lucy Durack) is clingingly feminine. “I hate these half-masculine women who go banging about,” she tells Elyot. “I should think you needed a little quiet womanliness after Amanda.” Victor (John Leary), on the other hand, wants to protect and guide Amanda, as the dear sweet innocent thing that she isn’t.
Sam Strong’s production for the Melbourne Theatre Company makes a decent fist of the comedy, and the cast deals with the cut-glass accents creditably, although in some cases without the nonchalant ease necessary for Coward’s speedy dialogue. Garner and Ford are fun to watch as the reprehensible couple, and Durack and Leary make good foils to their louche glamour.
It’s directed with a slightly heavy hand, which can obscure the rhythms of the text and dampen Coward’s sprezzatura. There’s a lot of business in this production: it opens with a bravura musical number, pulling on Durack’s musical experience, in which Tracy Grant Lord’s spectacular revolve is the major star, and Julie Forsythe’s French maid becomes an (admittedly very funny) spectacle of clowning.
Mathew Frank’s musical interludes are deliberately anachronistic, culminating in a swing version of Blame It On the Boogie. I wished for more fizz in the music: something of the jagged boldness of Barrie Kosky’s Poppea, for instance, in which Cole Porter was jammed next to Monteverdi to brilliant effect. Paul Jackson’s lighting design is, as with much of his work, an essay in shadows.
The darkest subtext is the violence of the relationships. Victor threatens to murder Sybil when she refuses to flee with him, and tells Amanda that “certain women should be struck regularly, like gongs”. Once you remove the glamour of 1930s nostalgia and silk dressing gowns, he is precisely what Amanda calls him: “A cad and a bully.”
In fact, this is about a bleak a view of the destructiveness of co-dependency as you can get. Strong’s production blurs these edges, but there’s no denying it’s fun.
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