Crackerjack rating: 9 / 10.
Even before it opened, this home grown Bath production of Noel Coward’s best known play had box office success written all over it.
How could you go wrong putting Sex and the City and Mr Darcy on stage together? The answer is, you couldn’t.
The chemistry between Kim Cattrall and Matthew Macfadyen is all that you could hope for – and more – in this waspish tale of a jet setting couple who can’t live with each other but can’t live without either.
Those with memories that go back 20 years will remember that there was a similar much-talked-about production of the play in Bath starring soap star Joan Collins. The play is best remembered now as the occasion when the Hollywood star was soundly upstaged by a then virtually unknown Sara Crowe.
Kim Cattrall, on the other hand, had no problem in making sure that we all knew whose name was going to be up in lights when the play goes straight from Bath into London’s West End.
But what’s good about this production is that the pecking order is just the one Noel Coward probably had in mind. What you need and what we’ve got is a glittering leading lady of whom it is totally believable that a man would leave his new wife on his wedding night to run away with her.
Better yet we have a hugely charismatic male lead who delivers waspish one liners like he has just invented the art form.
Round the whole thing off with two beautifully played, long suffering spouses who end up stealing the very end of the show and you can safely say you’ve cracked any difficulty in packing ’em in to London’s West End.
What’s particularly interesting about the production itself is that it has a very modern feel. It was first performed exactly 80 years ago in 1930 but apart from the fact that they just don’t write them like that any more you don’t get the feeling you are watching a period piece.
My guess is that it is against this production that any future Private Lives revival will be judged – and probably found wanting.
Christopher Hansfor
http://www.crackerjack.co.uk/bristol/review/private-lives-theatre-royal-bath/theatre
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