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TT: Mr. Coward’s little sermon

November 18, 2011 by Terry Teachout

In today’s Wall Street Journal I review the Broadway revival of Private Lives. Here’s an excerpt.
* * *
Throughout most of his life, Noël Coward was widely regarded as a theatrical lightweight, albeit a brilliant one. Not until the ’60s did the critics start to figure out that “Private Lives,” his masterpiece, was something more than (in his own ironically self-deprecating words) “a reasonably well-constructed duologue for two experienced performers, with a couple of extra puppets thrown in to assist the plot and to provide contrast.” Needless to say, Coward knew better, and now so do we. Yes, “Private Lives” is a comedy–one of the funniest ever written–but beneath its slapstick lunacy and impish repartee, it preaches a stealthy sermon about hypocrisy that is as much to the point today as it was in 1930. Elyot, the playwright’s fictional alter ego, gets right to the heart of the matter when he tells Amanda, his ex-spouse and companion in adultery, to laugh at “the futile moralists who try to make life unbearable….Flippancy brings out the acid in their damned sweetness and light.” Indeed it does, and you don’t have to be an anarchist to smile wickedly as Coward’s characters poke bruising fun at all the censorious prigs, both moral and political, who talk a better game than they play.
GROSS-articleLarge.jpgSuch artful tutorials deserve to be seen regularly. Alas, it’s been nine years since “Private Lives” was last performed on Broadway, but that production, which starred Lindsay Duncan and Alan Rickman, was so good that playgoers are still buzzing about it. Not since then has there been a first-rate big-ticket Coward revival in New York, which explains part of the general interest in the new “Private Lives” that just sailed in from London by way of Toronto. Most of it, though, arises from the onstage presence of Kim Cattrall, lately and famously of “Sex in the City,” who plays Amanda. In New York that may sound like stunt casting of the worst kind, but Ms. Cattrall is well known in England as a serious stage actress. She is not, however, an ideal Amanda…
For starters, Ms. Cattrall lacks the silken lightness of touch necessary to play Amanda convincingly. Paul Gross, her Elyot, has it in abundance, which is why he gets most of the laughs. Not only does he know how to flick off his lines with sly casualness, but he does it without imitating Coward’s style of acting, which makes his performance all the more effective. He and Ms. Cattrall have terrific onstage chemistry, and their romantic scenes couldn’t be sexier, but whenever the tone of “Private Lives” turns comic, her overemphatic, inadequately varied delivery undercuts the humor.
Just as important, Ms. Cattrall, who makes no secret of being 55, has been cast as a thirtyish beauty in a play about the “bright young things” of whom Coward himself was a prime example. When “Private Lives” opened in 1930, he was 30 and Gertrude Lawrence, his co-star, was 32, and their self-evident youth was central to the play’s effect. Ms. Cattrall, to be sure, looks gorgeous, but she doesn’t look 30, and the fact that the play has been recast to accommodate her age–Mr. Gross is 52–distorts it still further…
* * *
Read the whole thing here.
Noël Coward and Gertrude Lawrence in an excerpt from the balcony scene of Private Lives, recorded in 1930. (The video has no relation to the recording!)

UPDATE: To hear Gertrude Lawrence and Orson Welles in a heavily abridged 1939 Campbell Playhouse radio adaptation of Private Lives, go here.

TT: Almanac

November 18, 2011 by Terry Teachout

“Surely that little pseudo-gothic church on Broadway, hidden amongst the skyscrapers, is symbolic of the age! On the whole face of the globe the civilization that has conquered it has failed to build a temple or a tomb.”
André Malraux, Voices of Silence

Terry Teachout

Terry Teachout, who writes this blog, is the drama critic of The Wall Street Journal and the critic-at-large of Commentary. In addition to his Wall Street Journal drama column and his monthly essays … [Read More...]

About

About “About Last Night”

This is a blog about the arts in New York City and the rest of America, written by Terry Teachout. Terry is a critic, biographer, playwright, director, librettist, recovering musician, and inveterate blogger. In addition to theater, he writes here and elsewhere about all of the other arts--books, … [Read More...]

About My Plays and Opera Libretti

Billy and Me, my second play, received its world premiere on December 8, 2017, at Palm Beach Dramaworks in West Palm Beach, Fla. Satchmo at the Waldorf, my first play, closed off Broadway at the Westside Theatre on June 29, 2014, after 18 previews and 136 performances. That production was directed … [Read More...]

About My Podcast

Peter Marks, Elisabeth Vincentelli, and I are the panelists on “Three on the Aisle,” a bimonthly podcast from New York about theater in America. … [Read More...]

About My Books

My latest book is Duke: A Life of Duke Ellington, published in 2013 by Gotham Books in the U.S. and the Robson Press in England and now available in paperback. I have also written biographies of Louis Armstrong, George Balanchine, and H.L. Mencken, as well as a volume of my collected essays called A … [Read More...]

The Long Goodbye

To read all three installments of "The Long Goodbye," a multi-part posting about the experience of watching a parent die, go here. … [Read More...]

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