Reviews 2006
Reviews 2006
✭✭✭✭✩
by Noel Coward, directed by Morris Panych
Shaw Festival, Royal George Theatre, Niagara-on-the-Lake
July 14-November 18, 2006
"An Intriguing Design"
The second most performed playwright at the Shaw Festival is Noel Coward. This season the Shaw has added to its list with a thoroughly delightful production of Coward’s notorious 1933 comedy “Design for Living” about the downs and ups of a ménage-à-trois. Ernst Lubitsch made a popular film of the same name immediately after the play closed but with a screenplay completely rewritten by Ben Hecht. Coward depicts the growth of a MMF threesome who truly forms an equilateral triangle of love rather than the V-shaped design in the film with two men happily in love with one woman. This was scandalous enough for Hollywood before the 1934 Production Code kicked in without having the two men also in love with each.
Coward wrote the play for him and his friends the famed American acting couple Alfred Lunt and Lynn Fontanne, the play paralleling much of their own relationship. The notion was that their fame would allow them to perform a play whose subject matter would otherwise be deemed unacceptable. They agreed to only 135 performances and no tour. The play was a great success and the acting was praised, but critics generally disproved of the play with George Jean Nathan of “Vanity Fair” calling it “little more than a pansy paraphrase of ‘Candida’”.
The play is a comedy and has its share of witty epigrams, but it does in fact examine the difficulties of the threesome in coming to terms with the true nature of their relationship. In his programme notes director Morris Panych calls it “a coming-out play of sorts” and that is probably why he gets the mixed tone of the play so right. Yes, there is laughter, but there is also pain, hurt, frustration, attempts to lead a normal life before the trio come an awareness that their love simply doesn’t fit into any of society’s accepted patterns for relationships. Besides this, rather that treating the triangle as a fait accompli, as sometimes happens, Panych focusses on the development of the triangle and the confused, then bemused, awareness of the three that this really is the form their relationship must take for them to be happy.
Gilda, Leo and Otto--originally played by Fontanne, Lunt and Coward--are here played by Nicole Underhay, David Jansen and Graeme Somerville. Underhay makes Gilda’s general confusion quite attractive. On the one hand she is a woman who would like the same freedoms that men have in their lives, yet on the other she has enough scruples to wonder rather abstractly whether betraying Otto in his own studio with his best friend isn’t rather “wicked” of her. She tries in Act 2 to live in an exclusive relationship with Leo only to find that his obligations as a playwright always overshadow her attempts at creativity as an interior designer. She thinks that a “mariage blanc” with the elderly art dealer Ernest Friedman will allow her creativity to flourish and it does but then her love life is nil. Thus Panych and Underhay show quite clearly that Gilda’s confusion stems from her trying to look at life in an either-or fashion until the awareness of “both” as an answer dawns.
Jansen might initially seem miscast as Leo, appearing rather more petulant than debonair. But as it turns out his cynical laissez-faire attitude and mocking tone serves to distinguish him from Somerville’s more serious-minded Otto and ultimately is shown to be a kind of mask he wears to hide his passion. Somerville is excellent as Otto and Panych is right to let his disappointment in both Acts 1 and 2 sound a real note of unhappiness. The drinking scene between Leo and Otto in Act 2, the funniest single scene in the play, is beautifully directed and played as the two friends, deliberately disinhibiting themselves through drink, gradually become aware of the sexual attraction that underlay their friendship and decide follow it through. This is truly a sublime humour as both wonder in their self-imposed haze, “Is what’s happening what I think it is?” only to acquiesce after a brief struggle with themselves to realize, “I guess it is. Well, why not?”
The only other major character in the play is Ernest Friedman played by Lorne Kennedy as a prissy asexual (though likely a firmly repressed homosexual) art dealer of the older generation. His stiffness and repression serve as a fine foil for the trio who seek a life devoid of either.
Among the minor characters Jane Johanson is hilarious as Leo’s upright London maid Miss Hodge, who becomes increasingly exasperated at the immoral goings-on in Leo’s flat. In the New York scenes Jeff Madden and Jessica Lowry as the not so happily married couple of the Henry and Helen Carver provide a good example, if we needed one, of how conventional marriage does not always make people happy. As Grace Torrence, "a typically Europeanized New York matron" according to Coward, Camilla Scott, still sporting Katherine Hepburn’s Bryn Mawr accent from “High Society”, is a pompous female counterpart to Lorne Kennedy’s Ernest.
Anyone who sees “Design for Living” will be amazed to see the subject of sexuality treated so forthrightly in 1933. It makes plays of the 1950s like “Tea and Sympathy” (1953) appear positively quaint. To watch Otto, Leo and Gilda gradually discover who they are is a liberating experience and, in such an insightful production as this, we can’t help but share in the exhilaration they feel.
©Christopher Hoile
Note: This review is a Stage Door exclusive.
Photo: (top) Graeme Somerville, Nicole Underhay and David Jansen, ©David Cooper; part of set for Design for Living, ©Ken MacDonald.
2006-11-13
Design for Living