An actor’s life can be quite hazardous. Last week, a day or two after I had seen him perform as Shakespeare’s Timon of Athens at the National Theatre, Simon Russell Beale fell over and dislocated a finger, running off the stage in agony. And last weekend my niece Anna Chancellor showed me some nasty bruises on her leg that she had got while tumbling about with her stage lover during the second act of Noël Coward’s Private Lives. That was after just the first two preview performances, and the play is only now beginning a six-week run at the Chichester Festival Theatre in West Sussex.
I had gone there to see her with her father, my elder brother John, and was struck by how old the audience was. Although 72 myself, I felt like one of its younger members; and when I later mentioned this to Anna, she said that she sometimes felt as if it were the end of an era, and that once this generation had passed away, there wouldn’t be any theatre audiences any more. Maybe that’s true, or maybe people start going to the theatre only when they are old, like they also start reading the Daily Telegraph at that time.
Anyway, some of the audience in Chichester looked as if they might be old enough to have seen the original 1930 production of Private Lives that starred Coward himself with Gertrude Lawrence (and had Laurence Olivier in one of the two supporting roles). But decrepit though they may have looked, they got all the jokes immediately while I was still straining to hear the actors’ lines. The trouble is I’m rather deaf, and the headsets provided by theatres to improve one’s hearing don’t quite do the trick for me: they make everything louder but not quite crisp enough, so the words still sound blurred.
As you probably don’t need reminding, Private Lives opens at a hotel in Deauville where two British couples — Elyot and Sybil, and Victor and Amanda — are on their honeymoons in adjoining bedrooms that share a terrace overlooking the sea. The trouble is that Elyot and Amanda, two fun-loving, decadent products of the Roaring Twenties, were previously married to each other and are horrified to meet again in these circumstances five years after their divorce. Their marriage had been a tempestuous one that ended bitterly, but they recognise rapidly that despite everything they still love each other and resolve to abandon their new spouses and run away together.
They flee to Paris, where Amanda has a flat, and after some initial heavy petting proceed to fall out again and fight and throw things at each other. They are preparing to separate acrimoniously once more when their new young spouses appear at the flat, having set off together from Deauville in pursuit of them. Conventional and proper as they are by comparison with Elyot and Amanda, Sybil and Victor then fall into a violent quarrel, suggesting that they, too, are headingfor the same kind of disastrous love-hate relationship. This effects a final reconciliation between Elyot and Amanda, who sneak out of the flat together as the play ends.
Playing opposite Anna’s Amanda as her ex-husband Elyot is Toby Stephens, whose wife in real life, Anna-Louise Plowman, plays Sibyl and may perhaps find it disconcerting to see them performing as passionate lovers on stage. But there’s a tradition of husbands and wives acting together in Private Lives. Toby Stephens’s parents, Maggie Smith and the late Robert Stephens, played Amanda and Elyot in a 1972 London production directed by John Gielgud, and Richard Burton and Elizabeth Taylor did the same in a Broadway production of 1983. (Many years earlier Burton and Taylor had played the leads in the film version of Edward Albee’s Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf?, which isn’t a comedy like Private Lives but features the same kind of desperate couple who can’t live either with or without each other.)
It’s not my job to review the play, so I will make only a couple of critical comments about a generally good production in which Anna, naturally, was excellent. One is that Elyot and Victor appeared too alike, when Elyot is supposed to be super-sophisticated (‘Sleek and satiny, clipped and well-groomed, with a cigarette, a telephone, or a cocktail at hand’, as Cecil Beaton described Noël Coward) and Victor, by contrast, rather galumphing and tweedy. I could hardly tell the difference between them.
But more importantly, whatever happened to the song ‘Some Day I’ll Find You’, one of Coward’s best and most popular, which he wrote specially for the play? It is Amanda’s singing of this song that reignites Elyot’s love for her (‘You always had a sweet voice, Amanda’), but in this production it’s missing. It’s true that Anna claims she hasn’t got a sweet voice, but despite taking singing lessons she wasn’t asked to sing it. Perhaps somebody was trying to be kind to her, but it was a rotten decision.
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