Private Lives

From February 2014

After half a season of unremitting glum & doom - Dark Road (serial killer runs amok in Bruntsfield), Dostoyevsky's Crime & Punishment (no idea, left at half time having been splattered with fake blood), Long Day's Journey Into Night ("a family struggling with addiction, truth and love", wanted to kill myself afterwards) - it was a relief to be at the Lyceum on Friday to see Noël Coward's Private Lives.

Coward wrote plays like there was no tomorrow: over 50, including staples of both the West End and rep theatre such as Blyth Spirit, Design for Living and Hay Fever. The plots are wafer thin but you can hardly blame him as he also had to make time to write 300+ songs, smoke heavily and star in The Italian Job.

From the moment the play opens in a hotel on adjoining balconies in an Art Deco hotel in Deauville you know that it is going to be a comedy of errors, manners and marital confusions. I can't believe for a moment that Eric Chappell and Jean Warr weren't inspired by this when they wrote 1980's TV series Duty Free. (And although they got the feel of the piece they somehow managed to lose all the humour.)

A recent production of Private Lives in London starred Anna Chancellor and Toby Stephens. I can imagine Chancellor doing a very good turn at Amanda Prynne but I don't think she would have been any better than Kirsty Betterman in the Lyceum's version: one moment, all sweetness & light and in another downright vicious. And John Hopkins as her former husband Elyot Chase showed his dramatic timing in a way that he was never allowed to do as Sergeant Dan Scott in Midsomer Murders.

In a very real sense, a complete farce.

Private Lives, Royal Lyceum Theatre, until 8th March