DESIGN FOR LIVING. To 10 August.

Manchester

DESIGN FOR LIVING
by Noel Coward

Royal Exchange Theatre To 10 August 2002
Mon-Fri 7.30 Sat 8pm Mat Wed 2.30pm & Sat 4pm
Audio described 13 July 4pm
Runs 3hr Two intervals

TICKETS 0161 833 9833
Review Timothy Ramsden

A bold way with Coward that doesn't come off.There are lots of ideas for freeing actors' imaginations in rehearsals that should never be dragged on stage. One is updating Coward, opening out his gay subtext.

Relocating the action from 1932 asks us to believe that in a jet-setting, low cost air-travel age a busy person would travel transatlantic by sea, that smart people who want to shield phone calls live with colour TV and a remote, yet have no answerphone. The artistic trio who swap homes, countries (Paris, London, New York) and partners dress down modern style yet talk of staying in the most traditionally fashionable hotels and freely expect people to have servants.

It's to director Marianne Elliott's credit (or the Coward estate's insistence?) she hasn't cut the jarring references. They wouldn't matter over-much if the whole concept worked better. Its outline, at least, is clear. Interior designer Gilda veers between her artist and playwright friends; when she leaves both simultaneously they drunkenly discover their mutual attraction (would it take so long to surface these days?). Coward's point is, extraordinary temperaments cannot settle with, or without, each other (Hay Fever, Private Lives?). To have the trio climaxing the action as a clinching threesome - a Gilda sandwich - reduces them to sexually dependent beings. They are, but that's not all they are.

Coward believed sexual implication was more powerful than display. Well, up to a point; but that's the point Coward had reached, and how he wrote. The sexual undertow is far more potent as that – here, it's like a counter-melody asked to work as a solo tune

Nor does the script's style fit the actors' modern body language. The three central performers find no way to match the two. Victoria Scarborough starts off quick and nervy and carries on so. It makes for indistinct articulation when her back's to you, but is preferable to the awkwardness in her lovers' delivery of lines.

It takes three seconds maximum for Judith Barker's cleaning-woman to show Coward's potency with theatrical cliché and remind us this is a comedy. For the rest, the design goes for little when a production's whole architecture is wrong.

Gilda: Victoria Scarborough
Ernest: Ken Bones
Otto: Oliver Milburn
Leo: Clarence Smith
Miss Hodge/Grace Torrence: Judith Barker
Matthew: Andonis Anthony
Helen Carver: Tara Moran
Henry Carver: John Lawson

Director: Marianne Elliott
Designer: Lez Brotherston
Lighting: Paule Constable
Sound: Peter Rice
Music: John O' Hara
Dialect: Tim Charrington
Fights: Renny Krupinski

2002-07-02 09:14:49