Theatre review: Private Lives, Vaudeville Theatre

By Charles Spencer Published: 7:30AM GMT 04 March 2010

Previous of Images Next Kim Cattrall and Matthew Macfadyen in Private Lives at the Vaudeville Theatre Photo: ALASTAIR MUIR Kim Cattrall and Matthew Macfadyen in Private Lives at the Vaudeville Theatre Photo: ALASTAIR MUIR

Noël Coward was surprisingly self-deprecating about Private Lives (1930), certainly the biggest of all his plays. While revelation that there was "a well-written love scene" in action one and "a sure volume of receptive to advice sex psychology" underlying the argue scenes in action two, he described the ancillary characters as "a integrate of additional puppets" and resolved that as a finish fool around it left a lot to be desired, not slightest since there was so small tract growth after the initial act.

Watching Richard Eyre"s superb new prolongation one can usually wonder at at his modesty. Eighty years on this conspicuous humerous entertainment about love, lust, and matrimony still seems both miraculously uninformed and in couple of instances frank. Its building a whole is a indication of magnificence and economy, and the spare, smart dialogue, "jagged with sophistication" to steal a word from the fool around itself, is hardly impeded with a singular surplus word.

Matthew Macfadyen talk Private Lives: strike me, one some-more time Hay Fever at the Chichester Festival Theatre, examination Gillian Anderson talk for A Dolls House Parlour Song at the Almeida, examination Doctor Who: new messenger is different 21-year-old singer

Mind you, Private Lives final performances of an unusually high sequence if it is to fly. The unequivocally laxity of the square functions opposite it, and the comedy"s reduction of quick mind and passion is an unusually tough pretence to lift off. Like Romeo and Juliet and Antony and Cleopatra, Private Lives requires a tangible passionate chemistry in between the heading players. If that fails to ignite, everybody competence as well pack up and go home.

But here the sparks unequivocally fly. As Kim Cattrall creates her initial opening as Amanda, ready to go usually in a feathery white towel, she puts one in mind of the kind of lady Marilyn Monroe competence have turn had she lived a small longer and someway clung on to complacency and stability. Cattral is a prophesy to behold, at ease in her body, and miraculously mixing disadvantage with pointy wit.

As Elyot, her former father who, similar to Amanda is staying at the same Deauville road house on the initial night of his honeymoon with a new spouse, Matthew Macfadyen has some-more than a hold of the cruel brag about him. When he remarks that sure women should be struck regularly, similar to gongs, he equates to it, as he proves in the thrillingly staged second action quarrel scene, finish with an blow up goldfish tank that springs a fantastic leak.

There was zero nauseating about Coward"s perspective of passionate attraction. He knew that love and hate, lust and assault are closely continuous and though it is not an understand that will find foster with feminists, Cattrall and Macfadyen leave no disbelief that both are incited on by a hold of the severe stuff.

This prolongation never utterly attains the bruising passion that Lindsay Duncan and Alan Rickman brought to the fool around a couple of years ago, but it comes close. And there are tasty ancillary performances from Simon Paisley Day as Amanda"s tricked father Victor, a pressed shirt who hovers hilariously on the margin of finish shaken fall when confronted by Elyot, and from Lisa Dillon as the horribly irritating, hideously stern Sybil.

Wonderfully droll and fabulously sexy, Private Lives has lost nothing of the allure.

****

Private Lives tickets at Box Office