Reviews 2011
Reviews 2011
✭✭✭✩✩
by Noel Coward, directed by Richard Eyre
Theatre Royal Bath/Mirvish Productions, Royal Alexandra Theatre, Toronto
September 25-October 30, 2011
“Shadow Boxing”
Mirvish Productions is current presenting a revival of Noel Coward’s Private Lives that began at the Theatre Royal Bath and was a hit in the West End and on tour throughout the UK. The production starred Kim Cattrall and Matthew MacFadyen as the sparring ex-spouses. For the Toronto production MacFadyen, who has numerous credits with the Royal Shakespeare Company and the experimental Cheek by Jowl, has been replaced with Canadian Paul Gross, who hasn’t acted on stage since his Hamlet at Stratford in 2000. It’s a terrible mistake and ruins what could have been a near-ideal production.
Coward’s 1930 comedy opens on adjacent balconies at a hotel on the Riviera. It so chances that Elyot (Gross) and Amanda (Cattrall), now divorced from each other for five years, have each remarried and decided to spend their honeymoons at the same hotel. Elyot has married Sybil (Anna Madeley), a younger more conventionally feminine woman, while Amanda and married Victor (Simon Paisley-Day), an older more conventionally masculine man. Discovering themselves side-by-side again, they rekindle their love and decide to abandon their spouses for a shameless new life together in Paris. With the symmetry of its plotting and the epigrammaticism of its dialogue the play is nearly as consciously artificial as Wilde’s The Importance of Being Earnest.
To act this kind of play requires a cast who can make the witticisms of the dialogue sound as spontaneous as possible. Famed British director Richard Eyre is able to elicit such natural performances from the entire cast--except from Gross. It isn’t merely that he can’t make Coward’s wit sound natural--he can’t even make his line delivery natural. He seems never to make eye-contact with anyone he is speaking to. He looks rather as if he were reading his lines off imaginary placards next to the actors’ faces instead of creating a coherent character from whom these lines emanate of their own accord. In posture and gesture, he seems constantly to be posing and admiring himself rather than interacting with anyone else on stage. The negative result is that in his exchanges with Cattrall, when sparks of alternating love and hate ought to be flying, nothing happens. Cattrall might as well be speaking to a brick wall. When Gross first appears with Madeley as Sybil, it’s hard to believe the two even know each other much less that they’re married. In contrast, there is so much more interaction between Cattrall and Paisley-Day that his Victor, not Gross’s Elyot, comes off as the more fully rounded character.
Were it not for this major flaw, the production is imaginatively conceived and beautifully executed. Cattrall may be better know for her television role in Sex and the City, but she is thoroughly at home on stage. In fact, hers the most vivacious. intriguingly complex Amanda of the last three I’ve seen. The establishes Amanda’s mercurial nature at once and thus immediately explains that someone like her would marry a stodgy fellow like Victor in hopes of more stability. Yet, stability is not really in her nature and the very fluidity of her line delivery and her gestural language shows that she is roiling with a wider variety of moods than any one man could handle. Her performance is a triumph.
The secondary couple is also excellent. Elyot may have wanted in Sybil an easier-to-manage woman than Amanda, but Madeley humorously reveals that with this simplicity comes an intransigence and lack of imagination far below Elyot’s intellectual level. Meanwhile, Paisley-Day is probably the most sympathetic Victor I’ve seen. He may be a dull old-fogey, but Paisley-Day shows that in loving Amanda he is capable of recognizing beauty even if it is too volatile for him to keep. He has great comic timing and can wring more humour out of his silences than Gross can from his lines. Caroline Lena Olsson does a fine job of avoiding caricature in the small part of Amanda’s grumpy French-speaking maid.
Designer Rob Howell’s costumes are a delight and perfectly capture the changes of mood of his characters--from the slinky felinity of Amanda’s honeymoon evening gown to the decisiveness of her smart blue suit at the end. His set for Amanda’s Paris apartment is a hoot, a swirling Art Deco crossed with Dr. Seuss, that whimsically reflects the kind of fantasy environment most suitable for two such free-spirited characters.
With Cattrall wielding all her arsenal of femininity and wit as Amanda, it’s a shame that the producers could not find an actor better suited to be her sparring partner. Canadians may like Paul Gross because of his television and film work, but if this Private Lives is to succeed on Broadway, Gross will have to be replaced with someone who can do better than mechanically utter lines and lurch about the stage. There’s no battle of the sexes when you have the quintessence of womanhood in one corner and a poseur in the other.
©Christopher Hoile
Note: This review is a Stage Door exclusive.
Photo: Kim Cattrall and Paul Gross. ©2011 Hugo Glendinning.
For tickets, visit www.mirvish.com.
2011-09-25
Private Lives