Word: cowardly
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Private Lives epitomizes these characteristics. It is 40 years old and as young as tomorrow evening. The present production is stylish, smart, and bubbles with frivolity. Coward creates the aura of anticipatory delight. Momentarily, one expects something scandalous to be said, something bizarre to be done, characters to be mesmerically drawn to each other and just as galvanically repulsed by each other. Just as F. Scott Fitzgerald threw iridescent parties in his novels, Coward has saturated his plays with the ambience of sophistication. One always seems to be slumming upwards at a Coward play, forever lingering on a moonlit terrace...
...Noel Coward pours the froth of inflection as if it were the champagne of wit. He is a connoisseur of surfaces, a sealer of the comic Everests of trivia. His plays are echo chambers of his own voice. His cool, clipped speech serves as an ironically British parody of the stiff upper...
...Coward was the first laureate of the beautiful brittle people. Amanda (Tammy Grimes) and Elyot (Brian Bedford) had been married (tempestuously), then divorced (bitterly), and meet again with new spouses on a terrace (naturally) in the South of France. The old magic still works potently, and they "elope" together-self-acclaimed wicked imps of sin and guilt. Their shunned and stunned mates (Suzanne Grossmann and David Glover) discover that they are truly meant for each other and not for Elyot and Amanda...
Stage Originals. Coward's characters are frequently mistaken for caricatures. Caricature goes to reality for a model, but Coward's people exist outside reality. They are stage originals. In this sense, the casting of Private Lives is just about perfect. Brian Bedford seems like a man who would be naked without his cigarette case, whose cigarettes, in fact, appear to be smoking him, as if he were an afterthought of his own props. Tammy Grimes seems not born of woman, but rather like a creature conjured up at a séance by some zany medium. She delivers...
...While Coward's languid worldlings endlessly assert that they are bored, irritated and weary of it all, the playwright gives them so much verve and vitality that they seem instead to have a fierce crush on life. The evening is permeated with the spirit of the '20s, gin-high, half-naughty, half-emancipated, free-souled and free-bodied-not the least piquant aspect of which is the decision of the two leading ladies to play their roles throughout sans bras...