It is exciting to see contemporary theatre, to be provoked, challenged and even sometimes to be mystified, but it’s also great sometimes to see old favourites. Yes, you know how it goes and you know many of the lines. It’s like when you watch the reruns of a clever tv show or go to a concert by the super rock star of your youth. It’s all in seeing it again on stage, in the reliving….
It was that kind of night on the opening night of the Genesian Theatre Company’s latest play, Henry Jennings entertaining revival of Noel Coward’s classic 1930’s romantic comedy, ’Private Lives’.
We are back in the dizzy world of Amanda and Elyot. Despite being divorced five years previously, they are so besotted with each other that they run off with each other, when they bump into each other at a French hotel where they are honeymooning with their new partners, Victor and Sybil!
We follow them again as they take us on a rollercoaster ride. One moment they are passionately kissing, the next they are arguing vehemently. This is the Coward play where the couple famously come up with the catchphrase ‘Solomon Isaacs’ for either them to use when they feel themselves slipping into bad habits. And this is the play where they trash their hotel living room, long before rock stars started to.
It was great to re-engage with the trademark Coward wit. ‘Private Lives’ featured so many examples. When it looks like Elyot and Victor are set to duel, Elyot, surely the Noel Coward character in this play, remarks,‘Women like seeing men fighting over them. It’s good for their vanity’.
Natalie Taylor and John Willis-Richards play the tempestuous, Richard Burton and Elizabeth Taylor like couple, with zest and oomph. Gina Lamprell and Andrew O’Connell give good portrayals of their much more conservative, middle class partners. Susan Carveth plays the French maid who has to maintain her composure in the fracas.
Debbie Smith’s set, Susan Carveth’s costumes and Michael Schell and Henry Jennings’s sound design effectively took us back to the world of London, 1930.
As the audience left, I noticed one elderly patron had a smile on her face and was skipping lightly up the aisle to the exit. Coward’s talent to amuse- and this comic gem- had weaved its magic again.
Henry Jennings production of Noel Coward’s ‘Private Lives’ opened at the Genesian Theatre, 420 Kent Street, Sydney on Saturday 5th March and plays until Saturday 16th April, 2011.
