THERUINOUSLIVESOFOTHERS
When Sibyl, honeymooning with Elyot, asks him if he’s glad they’re married, he replies that he’s ‘tremendously, incredibly, magnificently glad’, and then gives her an unenthusiastic kiss. Unaware of the situation, in the suite next door, Elyot’s former wife Amanda, is also on honeymoon with her new husband, Victor, who’s obviously more overwhelmed by Amanda than she is by him.
The dialogue in Noël Coward’s 1930 play often hides as much as it reveals about the characters’ feelings, and when Amanda and Elyot realise their embarrassing proximity to each other, all hell breaks loose emotionally and physically.
They’re still uncontrollably attracted to each other, by turn passionate, ecstatic, brutally critical and miserable. It’s very similar to the Burton and Liz Taylor marriage saga that kept newspapers going for years, and whose performances in the play on Broadway were, ironically, slammed by the critics.
The dialogue is, by turn, suave, sophisticated, caustic and brilliantly funny. The audience lapped up Elyot’s coruscating attacks on Amanda, including his prescription that certain women should be struck regularly, like a gong.
He hurls insults, provokes and bullies physically, and Amanda replies just as vigorously. Who’s Afraid Of Virginia Woolf has nothing on it. Elyot despises ‘the futile moralists who try to make life unbearable’ for the freebooting hedonists like himself and Amanda.
And yet he’s shocked that she had so many affairs while they were divorced. They can casually scupper their marriages to Victor and Sibyl with the same efficiency they use to scupper their own relationship.
It’s remarkable that a play that looks so honestly at the destructive possibilities in self-obsessed love can remain so scintillatingly entertaining.
Much of that of course is down to the performances, and the quick-fire direction by Patrick Mason. Shane O’Reilly produces a perfect Coward creation, catching all Elyot’s belligerence without losing the outrageous humour. Rebecca O’Mara’s Amanda is a dangerously attractive woman, with a wicked tongue and a ferocious determination to get what she wants, despite a niggling conscience. Admittedly, some good lines were thrown away and others lost through rushed delivery, but that sizzling dialogue is able to overcome occasional lapses.
Lorna Quinn and Peter Gaynor are particularly good as Sybil and Victor, the two abandoned spouses, seen as a couple of dull old sticks, but they take their chance wonderfully when they get to compete emotionally with the other two, leaving you wondering how all four might possibly end up.
It’s the sort of play that needs a lavish style to match the lavish expectations of the characters, and Francis O’Connor’s set delivers beautifully.
‘He hurls insults, provokes, bullies, and Amanda replies just as vigorously’