Private Lives

Coward’s timeless comedy of manners still sparkles with his razor-sharp wit, but this soggy production lacks fizz
Georgina-Brown-colour-176If one only knew Noël Coward’s Private Lives by heart, one should never be lost for a witty riposte in almost any situation. ‘Strange how potent cheap music is’; ‘It’s no use pitying yourself’ – ‘I seem to be the only one who does. I might just as well enjoy it’; ‘Very flat, Norfolk’; ‘Don’t quibble, Sibyl!’; ‘Well, I don’t believe in crying over my bridge until I’ve eaten it’; ‘What fools we were to ruin it all! What utter, utter fools!’ The list is endless.

Now 85 years old, the play remains a piercing portrait of a marriage, powerfully illustrating the tricky truth that explosive sexual attraction and marital harmony seldom walk hand in hand. I thought it could survive whoever or whatever a director might throw at it. Not so. Without the teensiest spark between Amanda and Elyot, the divorced couple who find themselves on honeymoon with their new spouses, on adjacent balconies, and in love all over again, Tom Attenborough’s touring revival is as soggy as a bonfire party in a downpour.

When Amanda and Elyot run away together, she describes their dangerously combustible relationship as ‘like two violent acids bubbling about in a nasty little matrimonial bottle’. A vibrant, vivid Laura Rogers is very persuasive as Amanda, fiery and yet icy and ‘jagged with sophistication’. But Tom Chambers’s Elyot leaves her with nothing to bounce off. This is a man who needs to convince us that he half means it when he hisses to his needy new bride Sibyl, ‘I should like to cut off your head with a meat axe.’

A harmless, charmless Chambers is deadly in all the wrong ways. While Rogers’s cut-glass consonants, never mind vowels clipped within an inch of their lives, are sharp enough to draw blood, Chambers’s diction is as blunt as Tupperware. His delivery is flatter than Norfolk, so dreary that even some of the best lines barely register. Not surprisingly for a Strictly winner, his charleston is expert, but it’s anything but expressive of his wild abandoned drunken passion.

The cheap sets – shiny plastic French windows in the Deauville hotel and, worse, skimpy chintz curtains with festoon pelmets, 1970s not 1920s, flapping around the view of the Eiffel Tower in Amanda’s unstylish apartment – contribute to a general absence of style and glamour. I’ve little to quibble about regarding Charlotte (Barbara in Call The Midwife) Ritchie’s crisply conventional Sibyl, and Richard (Dr Ryder in Downton – not a huge role) Teverson’s Victor is perfectly stuffy and tweedy. But in spite of their efforts, this production remains as stubbornly flat as yesterday’s champagne.

On tour until 12 March: 0844-871 7615, www.atgtickets.com