PRIVATE LIVES
Of all God’s blunders Noel Coward hated bores the most. Yet A.C. Thomas perversely makes Coward’s best-known comedy a heavy contender for the tedium trophy. Abandoning such baggage as wit and style, Thomas’s mauling aims mainly for the nasty and the smug. Unburdened by any dull desire to ground the dialogue in rounded characters, Thomas treats the lines as if they had been only arbitrarily distributed to the actors. Coward was never as contemptibly obvious as this.
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It’s a diabolical pity because, though Private Lives is a brittle, unashamedly artificial play, this final fizz of the jazz age is also a clever study of mismatched couples on doomed honeymoons. While escaping to the south of France with his bride, the stupid ninny Sybil, the epicene Elyot Chase encounters his temperamental first wife, Amanda. Though Amanda is now married to a bilious prig so ordinary he’s a walking narcotic, that proves no impediment to the estranged lovers’ tempestuous and inevitable reconciliation.
Coward’s gilded butterflies dwindle into dead moths, with the exception of Cynthia Armstrong’s sulky-sweet Amanda. Rather than settle for recitations sporadically goosed into half a life, Armstrong actually pins her lines to a person. But she’s as good as it gets. Joe Costa Jr. may not be dashing, but his Elyot must have more to offer than paltry and unearned rages, cloying small talk, and a dull slow burn.
