STAGE
Private Lives
Gielgud Theatre
★★★★✩
REVIEW
This crowd-pleasing production of Noel Coward's Private Lives is lightning in a bottle.
Lightning because it fizzes and crackles with energy, wit and farce. In a bottle because it is a curiously sealed world that Coward creates.
This is a play without context - there are no consequences, no morals and the characters appear rootless and pointless.
It was perfect for its era then (the bleak '30s) just as it is now (austerity Britain) and the audience left believing this escapist fun was a wise investment.
The story is candy floss - an inconsequential confection in a range of eye-catching colours.
Cad and dandy Elyot (Toby Stephens) is on honeymoon on the French Riviera with wrought young bride Sibyl (real-life wife Anna-Louise Plowman). High maintenance Amanda (Anna Chancellor) is in the neighbouring room after nuptials to stuffy Victor Prynne (Anthony Calf).
Elyot and Amanda endure their new spouses but nurse a savage passion for their first partners, their love having endured much longer than their acrimonious marriage.
When they see each other after five years - delight and terror. The double-take of double-takes. A moment to treasure and not wasted by director Jonathan Kent.
They know their decadence, their weak wills and their bottomless pockets mean they will flee together to Paris.
They also know, holed up in their (stunning) art deco apartment that history is likely to repeat itself, this time with the added imposition of two spouses on their trail, seeking retribution and possibly reunion.
Toby Stephens was born for the role of Elyot - he has a certain knowing, pompous air yet can deflate the moment with a camp eyebrow flick and then ram home the laugh with a mischievous relish for Ortonesque farce.
Anna Chancellor, too, is a sumptuous delight, swishing around in ballgowns and silk pyjamas, one minute paralysed by her betrayal, the next indulging her cruel passions without a care.
If that was all, that would be enough. But put them together and the chemistry is sinuous and sizzling.
Coward, of course, gives them the arsenal - the barbs, the quips, the self-satisfaction of love, all of which turns on a sixpence to bickering, then rowing then the flinging of the furniture.
While in this production - wonderfully designed by Anthony Ward - elegance often trumps savagery and farce is too often favoured ahead of acid, this is still a meatfeast of an event with a double act to treasure.
Until Sept 21, delfontmackintosh.co.uk.
