‘Private Lives’ – Effervescent

By Alix Cohen

1930. Elyot (Patrick Zeller) and second wife Sybil (Kate Day Magocsi), have just arrived at a chic Deauville resort on their honeymoon. He’s cosmopolitan, amiably amoral, and cruelly witty. She’s a “nice”, conservative, upper class girl with a penchant for shrill complaint. They are, as the playwright might say, not altogether suitably matched.

Arriving inconveniently at the same resort on their honeymoon are Elyot’s ex-wife Amanda (Olivia Gilliatt) and her new spouse, Victor (Zachary Clark.) She’s sexy, volatile, fiercely independent, and charming. He’s pompous, humorless, protective, and patronizing.

In search of quiet lives that would surely, in the end, defeat them, Elyot and Amanda have opted for conventional matches who adore them. Sybil and Victor are so anxious about their mates’ first partners, they insist on comparing and questioning ad infinitum. Patience is subject to unnecessary ordeal.

A malicious hand of providence places the couples in adjacent suites with adjoining balconies. Elyot and Amanda meet, wistfully recall their love, familiarly fight, and realize they’re hopelessly made for each other. “By a grotesque stroke of destiny, we have been thrown back into the same ditch,” Elyot bemoans. “You sound like a bad French novel, Amanda replies nonetheless reaching for him. There’s nothing for it then.

Elyot musters frayed principles and tries to convince Sybil to leave. She calls him selfish and beastly. Amanda does the same with Victor. “If I start giving in to you as early as this, our lived will be ruined,” he snaps.

Absconding with quite a spectacular lack of conscience, the exes engineer a scandalous escape to Paris. How the two incendiary personalities get on is a drawing room scenario in which passion literally battles breeding. Eventually, of course, Sybil and Victor track them down. And then…

Scenic Design (Hayden Bingham) creates 2D luxe, though the resort’s curtains could be fancier. Expensive simplicity of the Paris apartment includes a fine piano, gramophone (Coward’s “Poor Little Rich Girl” plays) and requisite globe depicting the smart set.

In-house designer Nancy Nicks once again executes pitch perfect Costuming from body-skimming dresses to ersatz Oriental robes and Hawes & Curtis-like men’s suits, showcasing detail, accuracy, taste, and fit.

A special call out to Fight and Intimacy Director, Dan O’Driscoll. Knock down drag out fighting is comically splendid; love making enviably credible.

Director Owen Thompson keeps all the plates spinning with finesse. Insouciant attitude arrives seamlessly in tandem with preposterous name calling and expansive rages. Sybil’s histrionically draping herself across furniture like Edward Gorey drawings works wonderfully. Space is imaginatively used, small business realistic, entrances and exits impeccably timed, pacing (vital in Coward), excellent.

Patrick Zeller and Olivia Gilliatt make divine protagonists. Chemistry is grand. Both actors wield accents epitomizing class. Both mercurially swing from appalling to sentimental. Zeller’s bearing is spot on. Gilliatt lights up the stage.

Kate Day Magocsi’s Sybil delivers appropriately ghastly, whiney cadence, though volume might be tamped down. The actor excels at physical comedy. As Victor, Zachary Clark begins a cardboard cutout in attempt to appear bland. Act II manifests more distinctive interpretation.

Also featuring Abby Malczon as the maid, Louise.

Private Lives is a hoot and balm, especially in these catastrophic times. The play is adroitly produced, going down like a well crafted cocktail. “A perfect Martini should be made by filling a glass with gin, then waving it in the general direction of Italy.”
Noel Coward

Photos by Doug Abdelnour

Private Lives by Noel Coward
Directed by Owen Thompson
The Schoolhouse Theater
Weekends through September 20
https://www.theschoolhousetheater.org/

Private Lives debuted on August 18, 1930, at the King’s Theatre in Edinburgh, with Coward as Elyot, Gertrude Lawrence as Amanda, Laurence Olivier as Victor, and Adrianne Allen as Sibyl. It moved to London’s Phoenix, playing to packed houses September through December, then to Broadway January 1931.

In London, critics were dazzled by style and wit. Various reviews called it “deliberately light,” “morally frivolous,” and “crashingly soigné.” Brooks Atkinson of The New York Times summed up the playwright’s gift as “impish wit, a genius for phrase-making, and an engaging manner on the stage.”

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