by Noël Coward
Directed by Michael Longhurst
Designed by Hildegard Bechtler
Composer Simon Slater
Fight Director: Kate Walters
Donmar Warehouse, London
13 May 2023, 14.30
CAST
Stephen Mangan – Elyot
Laura Carmichael – Sibyl
Rachael Stirling – Amanda
Sargon Yelda – Victor
Faoileann Cunningham – Louise / Violinist
Harry Napier – The Cellist
Two Noël Coward in three days, and three in a month! That’s how theatre tends to fall. We saw The Vortex at Chichester two days earlier, which reminded us that we last saw it at the Donmar Warehouse in 2002.
We hadn’t heard about this production, but walked past the Donmar on the way to Shirley Valentine, took the photo above so we wouldn’t forget, and managed (just) to get two tickets. The Donmar is always like a private club. So is the Almeida. They more or less sell out to friends / members. Reviews range from two stars to five stars, with an even spread. I’m mildly peeved at the sheer number of reviews of a play in a tiny theatre in Central London, that it’s near impossible to get tickets for. That number of reviewers don’t make the trek to Stratford, Chichester or Bath where tickets are available … or even south of the river. The Vortex garnered only half as many reviews in a large theatre that you can get into on the day.
My review of the Nigel Havers Company version of Private Lives explains some of our long history with the play.
There are general points about Noël Coward plays. It’s almost impossible to change the time frame significantly. A 1931 play like this could shift to 1920 to 1955, but not much beyond that. Before 1920 misses the social and sexual freedom. Post 1955 misses the gilded elite sense. There are too many references to smoking to eradicate too. Then they really were designed for proscenium stages.
The Donmar is a three sided thrust stage, like the Royal Shakespeare Theatre, but unlike the Royal Shakespeare Theatre, it has more or less equal audience numbers on all three sides. The RST has more of the audience face on to the stage and reduces prices at the sides too. Chichester had done Coward superbly two days earlier on a non-proscenium stage, but they have a curved “semi-thrust” stage, not a full thrust “act to three sides” stage. More later, but it caused problems.
An issue is that Coward wrote in three acts. His plays are brief and to the point (This is 2 hours 5 minutes including the interval). In 1930 as part of going to the theatre was dressing up to watch, people liked two intervals in which to see and be seen. Nowadays, we don’t. One interval is enough. This makes Private Lives hard to split.
Act One is on the adjoining balconies of a hotel in Deauville, where Elyot and Amanda, who were divorced five years earlier, have arrived for honeymoons with their new spouses (Sybil and Victor) and find themselves in next door rooms. Elyot and Amanda meet on the balconies, get back together and flee to Paris, abandoning their newly weds.
Acts two and three take place in Amanda’s apartment in Paris (she is so wealthy that she’d neglected to tell her new husband that she owned it).
So, there is a major set change between Act One and Act Two. This breaks a cardinal rule if its the only interval: the first part of a play should be longer than the second part. Mostly directors live with that and take the interval after Act One.
The Donmar had an ingenious solution. An instant 20 second set change. They did it by having the hotel balconies high at the back, with a blue cloth representing the sea below. This covered the furniture for Act Two in the apartment. As Victor and Sibyl left the balcony, a curtain descended while the cloth was smoothly whipped away in an instant to reveal that Elyot and Amanda were there on the couch for Act Two. They had crawled in.
Laura Carmichael as Sibyl and Sargon Yelda as Victor.
The casting is ideal. Sibyl needs to look younger than Elyot and Amanda, and Laura Carmichael brought her supposed age with her from Downton Abby, with the result that she looked perfect in the role. The play relies on Sibyl and Victor both exuding sincerity and self-righteousness. Amanda and Elyot work in the contrast. Laura Cunningham and Sargon Yelda make the exteemities of their erstwhile partners work. Both beautifully played.
Rachael Stirling exuded adult sexuality coupled with a fierce temper and an independent streak. The 1930 lines in their discussion about sexual history during their five years apart still bring nods of approval from women in the audience, especially when Elyot protests it’s different for men. Interestingly, Episodes Series 3, Episode 3 had Stephen Mangan going over much the same ground.
It is usual, habitual even, to play Elyot and Amanda as older and more worldly than Sibyl and Victor. When we used to do it (Karen was Sibyl) we had a 25 year age gap. That was too much and there were reasons. Coward intended less … at the first production he was 32 playing Elyot, and Laurence Olivier played Victor at age 23. Elyot is older than Sibyl. Amanda is older than Victor. This has been cited as the subtle homosexual subtext – an age difference is very frequent.
We came because Stephen Mangan was in it. We were not disappointed … as well as acting, he danced and played the piano. Mangan is simply one of the best actors on the current stage.
I read as many reviews as I could that don’t have paywalls, and some reviewers seem shocked at the darker side of the play, and that Elyot was manipulative and violent. I doubt that Coward played it as physically as this, but when we saw it at Salisbury and then in Bath (within days of each other), both were highly physical. You judge the direction on the physicality of the fights. In one (I think Salisbury) the curtain came down, paused, and Victor and Sibyl rolled underneath still fighting then rolled back. Here it was even stronger- he had his hands round her throat. Reviewers may have been lulled by the most recent production by the Nigel Havers Company in 2021, where frankly they were too old to make the physical fight work.
The Guardian review says Longhurst leans into the violence, adding an element of sexual power-play into their relationship.
Time Out adds: Amanda and Elyot viciously turn on each other at a second’s notice, with the sort of unselfconscious rage that abusers hide from the outside world.
Then the Independent feels: Longhurst takes Coward’s comic play about dysfunctional people and brings the lurking theme of domestic violence to the fore, with scenes often breaking out into febrile moments of physical fights.
Read the script! It’s all there. The really good productions all have this. That’s what the play is, and always was, about. It was the main fault of the Havers production that it was too smooth to have this.
(Pedants note for Kate Wyver of The Guardian – when the record is broken over the head, it does not send shards of vinyl flying. Vinyl is near unbreakable. These are 78 rpm discs made of shellac which break if you even look at them too hard).
On breakages, we were at a signed performance and when Elyot throws a glass at the wall it sails past the signer’s head and she ducks extremely well.
Stephen Mangan can do nasty – we saw him in The Birthday Party where he exuded smiling but chilling threat. Incidentally, he did his tongue trick (his tongue seems abnormally long) in that as well as in this.
On physical action, the coffee scene was easily the best I’ve seen or imagined. Here’s the thing now about the stage. We thought it too small an area, given the necessary couches, sofa, tables and piano. That meant they were confined in the dance and the physical stuff.
On the coffee scene, Mangan stuffs a brioche in his mouth and sits trying to chew it. We were at one side (stage left) and could only see the back of his head and also see that the audience opposite us crying with laughter. They could see his face. A lot of times in Acts 2 and 3 we could see Amanda facing us and the back of Elyot. For the type of play, a proscenium makes more sense. It’s hard to play to three sides, and thrust stages tend to be difficult to negotiate when they’re full of furniture- on a proscenium stage you act the fights and dancing in front of it. When there’s important comic visuals, they are played to the whole audience. They did well with leaping over and stepping over couches, but we still thought they were constrained.
The interval had the cellist and violinist performing throughout with a good comic touch when Act 3 started. No spoilers.
I’m inclined to five stars, but I think the confined stage hampered them. It was fabulous Noël Coward, but then The Vortex two days before at Chichester was even better – a lot of which is the set design and the theatre itself. So as The Vortex can’t have six, this had best have four.
****
DONMAR WAREHOUSE PARKING:
We looked at the website. Parking in Chinatown. 50% discount. Not very far away. We parked. At the theatre we had the ticket validated in their machine for the 50% discount. After the show, we went back. £53 for six hours. No, they had never heard of the Donmar Warehouse. They no longer validated any theatre tickets for discounts. What made me mad was disinformation. Had I known, I would have parked near the National Theatre on the south bank, and got on a bus free with my bus pass, and been there in 10 minutes at a saving of £39. Why doesn’t anyone update websites? Driving home along the Strand, that also had blue P – Trafalgar direction signs. What would it take Q Park to take them down or tfl to cover them?
WHAT THE CRITICS SAID
5 star
Tim Walker, The New European *****
TheatreCat *****
Daz Gale, All That Dazzles *****
4 star
Dominic Cavendish, The Telegraph ****
Sarah Crompton, What’s On Stage ****
Neil Norman, Daily Express ****
Mail on Sunday ****
Daily Mirror ****
Matt Wolf, The Arts Desk ****
Theatre Weekly ****
3 star
Kate Wyver, The Guardian ***
This production makes their fights ferociously physical. The challenge with staging Private Lives is to balance the light comedy with the blatant abuse that claws through the script: they shout, they push, they throw sharp slaps. Longhurst leans into the violence, adding an element of sexual power-play into their relationship. But liking it rough is no justification for what they do out of the bedroom. There are moments of genuine shock as Mangan throws Stirling across the stage by her hair, and those in the front rows have to dodge flying shards of vinyl … By foregrounding the domestic violence, the show sometimes finds it hard to navigate the humour. Mangan’s Elyot is a vile man, turning on the charm very selectively, and the easy way Amanda comes back to him – willingly, excitedly – feels gut-wrenchingly wrong. This is an admirable interpretation of a complex relationship, but one that still feels a little uneasy with itself.
Kate Wyver, The Guardian
Dominic Maxwell, The Times ***
Sarah Hemming, Financial Times ***
Andrzej Lukowski, Time Out ***
Fiona Mountford, The i ***
Gary Naylor, Broadway World, ***
Scott Matthewman, Reviews Hub *** 1/2
Rev Stan’s Theatre Blog ***
2 star
Nick Curtis, Evening Standard **
Jessie Thompson, The Independent, **
LINKS ON THIS BLOG
NOËL COWARD
- Blithe Spirit by Noël Coward, Bath Theatre Royal 2010 (Alison Steadman)
- Blithe Spirit, by Noël Coward, Bath Theatre Royal 2019 (Jennifer Saunders)
- Blithe Spirit FILM 2021 (Judi Dench)
- Fallen Angels, by Noël Coward, Salisbury Playhouse
- Hay Fever by Noël Coward, Bath Theatre Royal
- Relative Values by Noël Coward, Bath Theatre Royal
- This Happy Breed by Noël Coward, Bath Theatre Royal
- Present Laughter, by Noël Coward, Bath Theatre Royal, 2003 Rik Mayall (retrospective)
- Present Laughter by Noël Coward, Bath Theatre Royal 2106, Samuel West
- Present Laughter by Noël Coward, Chichester 2018, Rufus Hound
- Present Laughter by Noël Coward, Old Vic 2019, Andrew Scott
- Private Lives by Noël Coward, Nigel Havers Theatre Company, 2021, Chichester
- Private Lives, by Noël Coward, Donmar Warehouse, London 2023
- Noël Coward’s Brief Encounter, by Emma Rice, Salisbury Playhouse, 2023
- The Vortex, by Noël Coward, Chichester Festival Theatre 2023
MICHAEL LONGHURST (DIRECTOR)
Caroline or Change, Chichester Minerva 2017
Amadeus, National Theatre 2017
The Winter’s Tale – Wanamaker Playhouse, 2016
Carmen Disruption by Simon Stephens, Almeida Theatre, 2015
‘Tis Pity She’s A Whore – Wanamaker Playhouse, by John Ford
STEPHEN MANGAN
The Man in The White Suit, Bath Theatre Royal, 2019
The Birthday Party, by Harold Pinter, Harold Pinter Theatre, 2018
Birthday, by Joe Penhall, Royal Court, 2012 (Ed)
Jeeves & Wooster in Perfect Nonsense, Brighton (pre-London) 2013
Rules for Living by Sam Holcoft, Dorfman, National Theatre 2015
LAURA CARMICHAEL
Downton Abbey (FILM)
RACHAEL STIRLING
Plenty, by David Hare, Chichester 2019
SARGON YELDA
The Tempest, RSC 2012
Twelfth Night, RSC 2012
Comedy of Errors, RSC 2012
Peter Viney's Blog 
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