Word: cowardly
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PRIVATE LIVES by Noel Coward...
...Coward once went backstage and tartly informed the two leading players in one of his shows that their performance was "a triumph of nevermind over doesn't-matter." If Coward were around to chide Elizabeth Taylor and Richard Burton for a similar self-indulgence, he would have to trip them up on the way to the bank. Both are said to receive $70,000 per week. Coward may have written Private Lives but Midas cast this revival...
Presumably, the public has made it a box-office sellout in the titillating hope that it is a keyhole drama. Sad to say, Liz and Dick are almost as inept at playing themselves as they are at re-creating Coward's characters. All passion spent, they seem blankly disaffected, otherwise engaged. The chemistry between them is about as combustible as lukewarm tea, though their quarrels raise ghostly, vulgarized echoes of Who's Afraid of Virginia Woolf...
...that William Powell and Myrna Loy brought to Nick and Nora Charles in The Thin Man series. What Taylor's role model was for her part is undecipherable; it comes out as some sort of compromise between Mata Hari and Lady Macbeth. Inflection, which is paramount with a Coward line, is either beneath or beyond her. On a line like "Extraordinary how potent cheap music is," she puts equal stress on "potent" and "cheap" so that the fun is missing and the meaning is blurred. What she has doffed in avoirdupois she has put on in ancien Louis...
...actor whose names were eternally coupled despite their celebrated uncoupling(s) 2. Aging and forever expanding histrionic duo whose sum is greater than their individual parts, and whose mutual moves are perpetually played out in public (did you hear that ~ started a limited-run revival of Noël Coward's Private Lives in Boston last week?). 3. Any pair of people who come together, split, come together, split, until they seem to make a profession of it or until their acquaintances move past empathy to ennui...