NEVER FLAT, COWARD
There ’s at all times a slight frisson when Noel Coward’s rueful, dark-streaked romantic comedy is revived in our censorious age. We’re 9 many years on from the evening it first set about stunning the bourgeoisie with a portrait of the idlest wealthy: Elyot and Amanda assembly on adjoining Deauville balconies 5 years after divorce, and working away from respective honeymoon spouses. One can belief trendy administrators with the crystal-sharp bickering, deftly depraved character drawing of the terrible new companions, and with the irresistible romance – “unusual how potent low cost music is” . However a few of us wait anxiously for the way the squeamish 2020s will cope with the explosion of violence between Elyot and Amanda within the second act.
Particularly his violence: cushion- throwing, trashing a classy Paris flat and an affronted girl smashing a vinyl document on a chap’s head all have a reassuring slapstick Tom-and-Jerry high quality. However a extremely onerous slap, a quick throttle, a throwdown, a headlock – not a lot. I’ve seen productions dial it down quite a bit, and positively keep away from down the opposite couple’s want for a bodily fight-arranger in Act 3.
No qualms right here. Michael Longhurst lets his excellent quartet free with all of the feral fury Coward envisaged, which for Elyot and Amanda is the flip facet of a white-hot erotic cost. They each want and enrage one one other: as Elyot admits early on the eroticism of their love at all times did convey out their worst behaviour: jealousy, irritable frustration, self-pitying rages. Male vitality, should you like, however completely shared by one of many girls: the distinction between Laura Carmichael’s sweetly-manipulative moist Sibyl and Rachael Stirling’s commanding Amanda is fantastically introduced out, proper from the beginning within the preliminary sly costuming: Stirling towers in a good flesh-gold costume on one balcony with Carmichael reverse in terrible lettuce-green frills.
I had by no means considered Stephen Mangan as a very Coward hero, however truly he’s excellent as Elyot: saturnine, dark-browed, grownup, a bit pale , a satan with the neatly timed quips however carrying an actual sense of a person who needs he behaved higher. Sargon Yelda as Victor, amusingly fairly a bit shorter than his runaway spouse Amanda (Stirling appears as if she might throw him over the balcony) can be fascinating. He’s allowed a bit extra dignity than traditional by this director, till the extraordinary encounter with Elyot close to the top and his personal collapse into fury at Sibyl.
This stability right through makes it not solely very humorous however, as Coward I think meant, edifying too. He, keep in mind, had been working since he was 11 years outdated within the tiring, concentrated world of theatre: on this manufacturing greater than traditional I discovered myself reflecting that it’s the rich idleness of those globetrotting social butterflies that dooms them. . It hollows them out till all that may be stated is “Chuckle at all the pieces, even us. Let’s be superficial and pity the poor philosophers”
So an ideal rendering of an ideal play, violence and all, shying away from none of its darker streaks. The setting sings, too: Hildegarde Bechtler has them at first on a excessive balcony above some blue-green dustsheet billows and peaks like a tough Channel sea. Then an amazing wind – of ardour, we should presume – all of the sudden whisks the material away and we’re down within the Paris flat. Setting the furnishings to make the quilt’s peaks so oceanic is an artwork in itself. So is the music, particularly when within the interval the violinist Faoileann Cunningham and the ‘cellist Harry Napier play collectively, in a musical joke of riposte and disharmony which elegantly displays the male-female rows within the story. It culminates in Napier having to be pushed resentfully off the set, kicking over his music stand. Good.
Field workplace donmarwarehouse.com. to 27 Could
Ranking. 5.
