Private Lives
Vaudeville, until 1 May
Party
Arts, until 13 March
This isn’t right. This can’t be happening. She’s over 50. Quite a bit over. In fact, she’s 53 and she’s playing the 29-year-old heroine in one of the finest comedies in the repertoire. And she’s doing it in London. And she isn’t even English. What possessed Kim Cattrall to imagine she could play Amanda in Private Lives? The answer turns out to be, supreme self-possession. From her first entrance, her starry grace communicates itself to the entire auditorium. The age question resolves itself straight away. She appears half-naked in a bathrobe. Her soft bare arms are plump and tanned and show none of the sinewed graininess of the gym or the bench press. One can’t tell whether surgical grooms have attended to her pelt but she seems as sleek and spry as the twentysomething she’s playing. And she doesn’t just perform the role, she knows it. She and Amanda might have been sisters. The turbulent emotional mishmash is presented in ragged harmony. The bickering pettiness, the coltish instability, the unappeasable yearning for romance, all these are artfully displayed and unified with a colloquial naturalism. And the accent? She doesn’t quite capture every vowel but what’s a vowel when she captures the house?
Her Elyot, Matthew Macfadyen, suggests both tradition and dissent from tradition. His sense of period is exact and his heavyweight physique, his robust vitality, seem to wipe away the mascara and feyness of the Coward era. This isn’t a Bohemian drifter with a pair of silk pyjamas but a full-on depressive seeking consolation in luxurious hilarity and the odd philosophical sideswipe. Macfadyen’s comic sense is absolutely secure, his intense and fractured desire for Amanda carries with it the constant pulse of reality, and the ache of melancholy in his voice lifts the performance to exquisite heights. Without question, this is the best production of a Coward play I can recall. Rob Howell’s design in act one looks a touch dowdy but his stylish floaty dresses are superbly done throughout. In the closing scene Cattrall looks as meticulously ornate as a baroque chapel.
The set in act two, an athletically modernistic swirl, is marred by one oddity. The back wall is decorated with an enormous Banksy-style mural showing a fleet of ducks dive-bombing a family of turquoise herring. And the external details of Victor strike a slightly false note. Director Richard Eyre, effortlessly assured in most areas, has neglected the ancient lore of actors. ‘When playing a miser show his generosity.’ Victor’s stiffness is stressed and stressed again. The ramrod stance and jerky gait are reinforced by dour green tweeds and a pair of moustaches that meet under his nose like kissing cockroaches. Eyre has even succumbed to a spot of Euro-conceptualism. Here and there he jemmies the play apart and shoves in a hint that Victor may be a shellshocked war veteran. Come on. Coward’s stagecraft shuns enigmas and encryptions. There’s no ‘maybe’ in his plays. If he wants a thing, he puts it in. Simon Paisley Day, usually the breeziest and most expansive of comedians, seems a little curtailed here, at bay almost. Laurence Olivier created the role in 1930 and made it clear he would have preferred to play Elyot. Every Victor feels the same. Perhaps Day has succumbed to a touch of the Oliviers.
A blow-in from Edinburgh has arrived in town fully six months since the festival ended. A worrying sign but the show defies expectations. Party opens with a gang of bourgeois students founding a political movement in Jared’s shed. (Jared: ‘Not a shed, please, it’s a summerhouse.’) With delicious frivolity and estimable intelligence the script focuses on the pretentions and autocratic longings of those who desire to govern. Top-notch ‘stupid’ jokes abound. ‘Clarkson doesn’t believe in climate change so how does he explain winter?’ A male character admits he mistook the flyer for an invitation to a bottle party. It happens to be his birthday too. ‘If I’d known,’ says one activist, ‘I’d have bought you a present.’ ‘Thanks,’ says birthday boy, ‘and the thought would have counted.’ Jonny Sweet, a handsome star not marred by his good looks, is extremely funny here and plays Jared as a demented but charismatic liberal struggling to contain his inner fascist. The last scene of this deceptively silly piece contains a devastating analysis of the single transferable vote system. By favouring politicians who create the least hostility STV tends to promote the numpty, the accidental candidate, to the top job. Thus it has the same failings that persuaded most societies to find a better system of government than hereditary dictatorship. The current run of this brilliant little play ends this week but the writer, Tom Basden, has only just started.
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