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Private Lives

Published Monday 5 June 2006 at 14:35 by Anne Hopper

Beneath its veneer of sophistication, Coward’s play is pure farce and Ian Forrest’s production opening the Keswick theatre’s 2006 summer season succeeds by diverting attention from the occasionally ponderous dialogue and thin plot. Leaving Martin John’s excellent settings, plus incidental music, to define the 1930s the cast takes hold of the play and runs with it - avoiding dull over-stylisation.

Private Lives is all the funnier for it. Love and hate are two sides of the same coin, never more evident than in the relationship between Elyot and Amanda, once married, now divorced and married to others but realising that though they could not live together, neither can they exist apart. Each married to other people they meet again by chance as both couples begin their honeymoons - eventually running away to a friend’s flat in Paris.

The best farces are but a hairsbreadth from tragedy and the see-sawing from passion to violence between Amanda and Elyot is given great depth and fleeting seriousness in the performances of Polly Lister and Guy Parry. Their abandoned new spouses, Sybil and Victor (Ella Vale and Kieran Buckeridge), give sufficiently rounded performances that we care about them, despite Sybil’s excessive shrillness. Completing the excellent cast is Marilyn Cutts as Amanda’s maid, her dialogue entirely in French, giving a well-timed and perfectly controlled performance of bewilderment and anger at the trashing of the apartment by the warring couples.

The five remaining plays in the new season have much to live up to.

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