Private Lives review

Before long, the body blows become physical as well as verbal. But what never gives both barrels is Amy Gavin’s production. The cast members don’t do enough to work the lines into howlingly witty missiles, but just rally them coolly back and forth. Double meanings are divorced from each other, so Amanda’s famous “Very flat, Norfolk”, for instance, lacks the sense of being a slight against Elyot’s former wife. We search for that thing that every marriage needs: a spark.

As Elyot and Amanda, Charlie Nobel and Hannah Ellis Ryan never convince as being magnetised together in a Stockholm syndrome-esque toxic relationship, relying on kisses to suggest hot-blooded passion. And there’s little tension, even when all four characters are brought together in the same room at the end.

Dylan Tate projects scenes from their weddings that gradually sour on to white sheets draped like the train of a wedding dress. But they’re obvious and overused, characters’ troubled faces appearing whenever they’re named, or showing Amanda smearing her make-up while she applies it neatly on stage. Similarly, sleepy jazz plays throughout, with on-the-nose titles and lyrics, such as Mad About the Boy.

There are nice moments where Nobel and Jack Elliot, as Amanda’s naive new husband, Victor, spar like rival kangaroos. Or when Amanda’s fingers crawl over Victor like ivy, while lustful desires pour out of her so easily that we never doubt her hollow fickleness. But without fine-tuned comedy to outweigh the nastiness of the characters, it’s a long time to spend in their company. And with no strong directorial idea driving it, the production merely labours the point that outwardly well-to-do couples can be awful behind closed doors. We’re left to sit, like the couples, in the wreckage of what could’ve been a joyful occasion, wondering where it all went wrong.

Manchester, then touring to the Dukes, Lancaster

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