Private Lives highlights the pain behind Noël Coward’s quips — review

Private Lives

Donmar Warehouse, London

When we think of stage-fighting, we tend to think of fencing duels, gunshots and good old-fashioned punch-ups. But some of the most lethal wounds are inflicted through words alone. Give a Noël Coward character a cigarette holder, a cocktail glass and a string of piercing bon mots and they can part your soul from your body without stirring from the chaise longue.

So it is with Amanda and Elyot, the famous divorcees at the heart of Coward’s Private Lives, who, through the magic of drama and the writer’s mischievous imagination, just happen to be honeymooning in neighbouring French hotel suites with their new spouses. Even before they have bumped into one another, they are already toying languorously with their latest partners. And once reunited, in a balcony scene almost as famous as Shakespeare’s, they are unstoppable, locked once more in a toxic tango.

There’s always a dark streak of cruelty beneath their frothy exchanges; Elyot in particular has a nasty, sleek misogyny about him. His gag about women needing to be struck like gongs lands with a horrid jolt. In Michael Longhurst’s new production that darkness is to the fore, together with a greater frankness about the reality of domestic violence and something darker yet: a kind of longing and existential desperation.

“Come and kiss me darling, before your body rots and worms pop in and out of your eye sockets,” cries Elyot to Amanda. He’s teasing, but it’s a line that zings out of this production. This is 1930: simmering beneath the couple’s volatile relationship is a sense that the party is almost over. This is a Coward cocktail shaken rather than stirred.

From the opening scenes, Stephen Mangan’s Elyot is more sullen than suave and has a kind of coiled, restless physicality. You can see the effort it takes to restrain his impatience with new wife Sibyl’s endless questions about Amanda. And once she (Laura Carmichael, nicely beady) stands up to him, he becomes an overt bully. Rachael Stirling brings impeccable comic timing to Amanda (her double take on hearing Elyot singing on the neighbouring balcony is an absolute joy), but there’s also a brittle quality to her imperiousness. When Sargon Yelda’s starchily correct Victor attempts to pat her on the head, you fully expect her to hurl him over the railings.

What Stirling makes clear quite brilliantly is that, beneath the poise, this is a deeply unhappy woman, chafing at the expectations society has of her sex. Once she and Elyot have holed up in a Parisian apartment, revelling in their sinfulness, there’s a kind of wild gaiety about her that feels almost frantic. As she flings herself into a riotous Charleston, Mangan’s possessive Elyot watches her with a mix of admiration and disapproval.

This act is where Longhurst’s production really hits its stride, with Mangan and Stirling rolling around Hildegard Bechtler’s gorgeous set — all coffees and creams, silky throws and soft drapes. But that sense of closeted intimacy becomes much more sinister as smart put-downs give way to slaps, and slaps to shocking, full-on violence. Her description of the relationship as “two violent acids bubbling about in a nasty little matrimonial bottle” feels all too real here.

There’s a wealth of pain here that is in the script — Coward was always far more than a purveyor of clever quips, and Longhurst’s staging feels true to that. The mix of comic and cruel doesn’t quite balance, however. The ending, in which Sibyl and Victor start brawling themselves and Amanda and Elyot, reconciled, sneak off, just doesn’t gel after the awful scenes we have witnessed. And there’s a sense of pushing rather too hard at an open door. With a little more stealth, this staging might achieve that serpentine mix of glide and grip.

★★★☆☆

To May 27, donmarwarehouse.com

Vardy v Rooney: The Wagatha Christie Trial

Ambassadors Theatre, London

It’s daggers drawn in Vardy v Rooney: The Wagatha Christie Trial too and, again, animosity comes cloaked in verbal niceties — with the added delight of legal understatement. This time the spat is both recent and real. Liv Hennessy’s drama is drawn from court transcripts of the libel trial brought by Rebekah Vardy against Coleen Rooney for citing her as the party who leaked personal stories to The Sun newspaper. The case, involving two “WAGs” (the cheesy acronym given to wives and girlfriends of famous footballers), made headlines, and was dubbed the “Wagatha Christie” trial by wags of the other kind.

The story is a giddy mix of celebrity and salaciousness, and Hennessy makes a hugely entertaining evening of it. Lisa Spirling’s sprightly staging draws, drolly, on the football background, with two excessively eager reporters bouncing up between scenes to give us their view on which side looks most like scoring and whose defence has gone to sleep.

The real delight though is in the mix of popular culture and legal procedure. Lucy May Barker is hilarious as Vardy, stalking on to the witness stand with the aloof gait of a wading bird and shrugging off accusations with the wide-eyed innocence of a footballer who has just committed an egregious foul.

“Well it reads like that,” she concedes, at one point. “If I’m honest.”

“I would much rather you were honest because you’re sitting in a witness box under oath,” shoots back Rooney’s lawyer with withering hauteur.

Laura Dos Santos, in her turn, brings a sense of wounded grievance to Rooney, and there is great enjoyment in the encounter between barristers (Jonnie Broadbent and Tom Turner, both coolly funny) and the heady world of Instagram, WhatsApp and the dark arts of the group chat. Halema Hussain and Nathan McMullen multitask as other characters caught up in the saga, with McMullen particularly enjoyable as Wayne Rooney and Jamie Vardy.

Beneath the comedy, the piece does have serious points to make about privacy, the pressure of scrutiny, the ugliness and summary justice of social media pile-ons and about the queasy relationship between tabloids and celebrities. And for all their smooth savoir-faire, there’s a sense in the end that the lawyers are no match for these two savvy women, who have been thrust into a bruising game at an early age and have had to play the ball as best they can.

★★★★☆ 

To May 20, then touring to June 17, wagathaplay.com