You’ll fall for this delectable dame -- but her bloke’s all wrong for her
SUCH an efficient playwright, Noel Coward. With Private Lives, you are out in two hours — including interval — heading home confident that you have heard a master’s lines, no matter how they were acted.
This is theatre at its most crisp; yet maybe there are times in this new production when it could be slowed down just a beat or two.
You may almost wonder if the cast is taking it at a lick in order to catch the 9.50pm Victoria train from Bromley South railway station.
Private Lives (first seen in 1930) is the one where Elyot Chase is honeymooning at a Deauville hotel with his young second wife, Sybil. They are dressing for dinner on their first night when Elyot discovers that the woman on the neighbouring balcony is his ex-wife Amanda. And Amanda is there on honeymoon with her own second spouse, priggish Victor.
Elyot and Amanda, divorced for five years, still love each other. The attraction reignites. They elope to Paris.
Laura Rogers makes a good — i.e. wicked — Amanda. You can believe that this one is a gambler, that she enjoys the sensation of sun oil on her skin, that she is mad and prone to the sort of flip exaggeration that describes three smallish measures of brandy as ‘gallons’.
THiSis an Amanda who, reclining on a sofa, stretches out her bare toes like a cat exercising its claws.
Richard Teverson is admirable, too, as ‘ rampaging gasbag’ Victor, judiciously milking the pomposity. in places, he reminded me of the late Richard Wattis.
Sibyl is not much of a part, being a doormat with a flapper’s hemline, but Charlotte Ritchie does as she ought.
And they manage all of this despite the lack of intimacy that blights Bromley’s Churchill Theatre.
Tom Chambers’ two- dimensional Elyot is more problematic. He needs to be posher, more loftily cruel, perhaps a little older. Elyot is meant to be 11 years Sybil’s senior. An older man would not gabble quite so.
Mr Chambers rushes some of the play’s celebrated lines, such as the one about how women should be struck regularly, ‘like gongs’. The slightest of pauses before the simile is surely required to make the most of it. Yet Mr Chambers just canters through it.
Director Tom Attenborough, one of the younger members of that celebrated theatre clan, could attend more tightly to detail. Elyot and Amanda would surely not have said ‘San Moritz’ but ‘St Moritz’, biting down on the first part of that Alpine resort’s name.
Lucy Osborne’s set, in Act One strikingly reminiscent of a recent West End production, is a bit wobbly when doors start being slammed. But as Elyot says: ‘Don’t quibble, Sybil.’ This is a watchable show, not least for Miss Rogers’ delectable, feline tootsies.
FOR tour details, visit atg tickets.com/shows/private-lives-2