Private Lives, Donmar Warehouse, review: Deliciously camp, everso restrained
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Private Lives review and star rating: ★★★
It’s been fifty years since the death of Noël Coward, the eminent British satirist who wrote frothy, seemingly throwaway comedic lines threaded with darkness and existential dread. Coward’s a complicated one: the style of his plays, and often, the language, can feel almost impossibly out of date, but his characters gleam with contemporaneity.
Private Lives, one of his most famous, still shocks, offering a pertinent take down of the supposed pleasantries of the upper-middle classes. It carries with it a tonne of laughs, even if Michael Longhurst’s production feels restrained, burdened by a faithfulness to Coward’s era.
The elephant in the room is that a queer, same-sex version of Private Lives would be an immense and astonishing update. Coward himself was gay, and it seems possible he imagined these two warring couples as queer, or at least put his queer perspective on them in his writing. “It doesn’t suit women to be promiscuous,” the charismatic bastard Elyot Chase, played by Stephen Mangan, says at one point. “It doesn’t suit men for women to be promiscuous,” Laura Carmichael’s Sybil Chase claps back, getting the biggest purr of agreement from the audience all night. Coward had a natural ability to emphasise with the oppressed, be it women, or queer people – and this would be the obvious 21st century space for exploration, as Michael Billington wrote recently in his 50th anniversary celebratory piece on Coward. This is A Song at Twilight, a 1966 lesser-known Coward play, “is one late work eminently worth another look,” he writes, for its story about a closeted gay man being outed by an ex-mistress.
Nevertheless, Private Lives is a lot of fun, even if Longhurst’s production, set in 1930, the year in which Private Lives debuted, suffers from ornate and stuffy sets, particularly the Parisian living room in which the Chases escape to in the second act, which cloaks the play in its era.
There are some brilliant comic performances. Stephen Mangan is ferociously good as Chase, the template of a toxic man who will say anything agreeable for an easy life and quite comfortably mean none of it.
He is on his honeymoon with new spouse Amanda, played by Rachael Stirling, but on the next balcony over, overlooking the same stretch of sea is his ex-wife Sybil and her new husband, Victor, played by Sargon Yelda. The play is in three acts, and the first, the comic set up, pits the two couples against one another, with the divorcees eventually forced to reminisce, creating questions about a potential recoupling. It’s a deliciously fizzy set up that could be in Carry On, and I pored over its cheery simplicity.
At its core Private Lives is a delicious take down of Elyot and men like him, who ruin lives with their privilege. Coward’s lines maintain their bite, with their precise balance of campiness, introspection and dryness. As for the campiness, it just gives and gives: best is when Amanda shades Sybil for being from “very flat” Norfolk but “that was no reflection on her, unless of course she made it flatter.”
Then there is the stark violence: “I should like to cut off your head with a meat axe,” Chase threatens with shocking brutality.
The Coward estate doesn’t allow re-writes and only “occasional cuts with good cause.” There is much violence in Private Lives that would struggle to work tonally in a modern adaptation, given the comic setting. Questions remain about how to make Coward’s writing feel relevant.
Private Lives plays at the Donmar Warehouse until 27 May