The Stage

Private Lives

Published Monday 31 January 2011 at 15:35 by Andrew Liddle

James Simmons recently clocked up a thousand appearances as Scar in Disney’s multi-award winning musical, The Lion King, at The Lyceum. Transferring from the West End to Oldham, he morphs easily from primary antagonist to the most antagonistic of protagonists; Noel Coward’s self-projection, the restless, flippant, self-centred, self-destructive Elyot Chase.

Maeve Larkin (Sibyl), James Simmons (Elyot), Christopher Naylor (Victor) and Jackie Morrison (Amanda) in Private Lives at Oldham Coliseum Photo: Ian Tilton

The Master apparently wrote his masterpiece, this comedy of ill manners and crass behaviour, in a week, and it still carries the air of mad dash and reckless passion. One moment, the former married couple Elyot and Amanda are honeymooning on the Riviera with their new spouses, and in a trice they’re hiding out together in Paris. Both places, incidentally, are beautifully realised by designer Michael Holt.

Jackie Morrison gives a highly polished performance as Amanda and makes good use of her lovely voice (recently given expression in her one-woman show Broadway to Burns) when singing snatches of that most beautifully haunting of songs, Coward’s own composition, Someday I’ll Find You.

Christopher Naylor gives a good account of himself in the role originally defined on stage by Laurence Olivier, as the earnest, slightly dim-witted Victor, struggling to make sense of it all. No less puzzled is Maeve Larkin’s Sybil, whose wedding night is not to be.

Tempestuous passion at times becomes the stuff of slapstick as Elyot and Amanda hurl more than insults at each other, with exquisite timing. No wonder Tess Alshibaya’s French maid looks so desolate stepping over the wreckage to serve coffee while everyone else in Robin Herford’s splendid revival postures indignantly.