Theatre in Review: Private Lives (Music Box Theatre)

	Paul Gross and Kim Cattrall. Photo: Cylla von Tiedemann

For reasons I've never really understood, Private Lives, conceived as a work of youthful daring, has, with age, become a warhorse for superannuated stars. To me, it's one of the key plays of the 20th century, a dazzling example of a writer taking a familiar genre -- in this case, high comedy -- and putting it to his own highly subversive purposes. Most of the cocktails-and-living-room plays of the period made a fetish out of love and fidelity, ending inevitably in a lovers' clinch or an adulteress' renunciation. In Private Lives, however, Noël Coward -- going far beyond the cynicism of even someone like Somerset Maugham -- portrays sexual attraction as nightmarish, destabilizing -- a maelstrom of unruly emotions and destructive impulses.

Richard Eyre, director of the current Broadway revival, says in a recent interview, "It's always struck me that in this play Noël Coward is like a war correspondent, a spectator watching his heterosexual friends and how their sexual wars play out." This is true as far as it goes; in his diaries and letters, Coward was an acute observer of his friends' marital problems, but I doubt that he saw heterosexuals as uniquely prey to the ruinous effects of romance. "I think very few people are normal really, deep down in their private lives," says Amanda, the play's high-strung heroine -- a pretty all-embracing remark, if you think about it.

In Private Lives, the whirlwind of appalling behavior engaged in by Amanda and her lover (and sometime husband), Elyot, has nothing to do with their sexual orientations. The source of conflict is their unconventional, iconoclastic personalities. They're constructed of nothing but sharp edges -- neither is able to pass up a flippant remark -- and they can't help leaving behind them a trail of smashed crockery, broken furniture, and ruptured hearts. Put the two of them together and the results are explosive. "That was the trouble with Elyot and me," says Amanda. "We were like two violent acids, bubbling about in a nasty little matrimonial bottle."

Eyre's production gets one thing absolutely right: As played by Kim Cattrall and Paul Gross, Amanda and Elyot are wicked children in grown-up clothing -- the kind who tie up their nanny and burn down the nursery, giggling all the while. They're perfect -- and perfectly disastrous -- for each other, trapped in a can't-live-with-them-or-without-them battle zone that brings out the considerable worst in their natures. It's all the fault of what Amanda calls "this ludicrous, overbearing love of ours," a statement that, for all the flirtatious talk, is about as romantic as Private Lives ever gets.

Cattrall's Amanda is a veritable repertory company of emotions and attitudes, all at the ready and all of them legitimate -- for a minute or two, anyway. Her reaction upon learning that Elyot's new wife is named Sybil, a rapid-fire series of expressions -- shock, horror, amusement, and cynical resignation -- is a superb bit of wordless comedy. Facing the prospect of a honeymoon in a hotel where her ex-husband occupies the adjoining suite, and determined to flee, she tells Victor, her new spouse, a ridiculous lie, claiming the place dredges up memories of her sister's death; forced to admit she has no sibling, her helplessness is absolute. ("I believe there was a stillbirth in 1902," she offers, by way of thoroughly inadequate explanation.) Later, in a Paris flat laid waste by Amanda and Elyot's fisticuffs and populated by an excess number of spouses, Cattrall turns into the most gracious of hostesses, driving everyone else around the bend with her impeccable manners. "I must apologize for the room being so untidy," she murmurs, while adjusting exactly one pillow.

Gross' Elyot is a mass of tangled nerve endings under a thin veneer of social assurance; he's also cursed with a candor that puts everyone around him on edge. When Amanda, recalling her decision to abandon a husband on their wedding night, says, "I could never have been happy with Victor. I was a fool even to consider it," Gross makes Elyot's response ("You did a little more than consider it") into an indictment hurled from the heights of Olympus. Equally amusing are his bitter announcement, "We're in love all right," as clouds of war form in the near distance, and his way of ostentatiously swilling two brandies at once when Amanda brings up his drinking habits one time too many. It's also hard to resist the look of mischief in his eyes and hers, as -- having announced the dissolution, now and forever, of their affair -- they gleefully slip away, leaving their two current spouses in the middle of a very Elyot-and-Amanda-style fracas.

The only thing wrong with Cattrall and Gross is that they are simply too old for their roles. Of course, Cattrall is the reason that there is a revival of Private Lives at all, and she and Gross are far more nimble and accomplished than the stars of the last several Broadway revivals, all if which were seemingly bankrolled by the AARP. But consider the evidence in the script: Victor is said to be seven years older than Sibyl, his new wife, who is 23; you do the math. Amanda says at one point, "Elyot was the first love affair of my life," we learn that they met five years before the start of the play; the idea that this fascinating, maddening creature lived without men for decades simply makes no sense. (In the original Broadway production, Coward, who played Elyot, was 31; Gertrude Lawrence, his Amanda, was 32; and Laurence Olivier, as Victor, was 24.) Private Lives is about young lovers driven mad by a potent brew of sex, nerves, and jealousy; when played by actors in their 50s -- no matter how adept -- their outrageous behavior can look disturbingly infantile. (As Victor and Sybil, Simon Paisley Day and Anna Madeley give fairly standard performances that could be inserted into almost any contemporary production of the play.)

Furthermore, Eyre's direction doesn't always provide his stars with the right kind of support. At times, the lightness of his staging gives way to over-elaborate bits of physical business. The forced civility of a breakfast for four is marked by two iterations of the same gag, in which sugar is spilled all over someone's lap. During that same scene, Cattrall, in a moment of surprise, spits bits of brioche out all over the floor. (In this and other moments, her performance skirts coarseness; also, both she and Gross are riding their voices pretty hard, and the results are audible.) The Act II battle royale between Amanda and Elyot is awkwardly staged; one has a sense of actors carefully hitting their marks, wrestling with strenuous bits of business, as when Amanda races to plug a leak in a goldfish bowl.

That goldfish bowl, a three-level affair, is part of Rob Howell's bizarre set, representing Amanda's Paris flat, for Acts II and III. It's a kind of Dada-meets-Deco fantasy, a copper-and-aqua concoction with a mural of birds hunting fish, an oculus with shutters that are controlled by a giant pole stuck in a tiny hole in the wall, and, besides a chaise longue and several pillows, a distinct absence of furniture. It suggests waiting rooms in the MGM version of Oz or a penthouse designed by Dr. Seuss. It's also, to my mind, a mistake; Amanda and Elyot are iconoclasts who lay waste to anything conventional or ordinary. Putting them in such an eccentric environment only gilds the lily; also, it hardly seems likely that Amanda, who has the attention span of a butterfly, would ever have the concentration to undertake such a massive project.

Howell's first-act setting, a pair of adjoining terraces in a hotel in Deauville -- depicted by a towering wall of louvers -- lacks the necessary feeling of luxury, and an act curtain, depicting the roofs of Paris, is rather fuzzily realized. His costumes, however, including some meltingly lovely creations for Amanda and some finely tailored suits for the men, are much better. David Howe's lighting invests the first act with all the power of romantic moonlight; he has a slightly harder time with the Paris flat, although he does manage a number of plausible looks. Jason Barnes' sound design is notably unconvincing, especially when anyone sits down to the piano; there's also a ringing phone that is much too obviously recorded. On the plus side, the preset music includes several catchy selections by the famed singer-songwriter Charles Trenet; also included is "Someday I'll Find You," the Coward ballad that is Amanda and Elyot's own personal anthem.

As you can probably tell by now, it's hard to have a single clear opinion about this production. We get new productions of Private Lives with clockwork regularity, but they almost invariably disappoint. The overpraised 2002 staging, with Lindsay Duncan and Alan Rickman, struck me as clinically depressed. The 1992 revival, with Joan Collins, probably left Coward spinning in his grave. I didn't see the 1983 production, with Elizabeth Taylor and Richard Burton, but the stories are legendary. Stacked up against these, Eyre's production, while far from ideal, is, at the very least, respectable; it captures Coward's temperament and his vision of sexual attraction as a kind of comic purgatory.--David Barbour