Word: elyot
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...plot line is as simple as sin. Previously wed to each other, Amanda (Taylor) and Elyot (Burton) meet again on the terrace of a seaside resort in France. Each is on a second honeymoon with a fail-safe second mate. Amanda has chosen conventional, humdrum Victor (John Cullum), and Elyot has chosen humdrum, conventional Sibyl (Kathryn Walker). But Amanda and Elyot are blithe spirits: witty, sophisticated, selfish, mercurial. They skip off to Paris, make love again, tiff tempestuously again and, when discovered by the appalled Victor and Sibyl, steal off together again...
...basic flaw with Taylor and Burton is that they lack any flak for feather-light comedy. They substitute double or sextuple entendre, as when Taylor says, "I feel rather scared of marriage really," looking out at the audience with the eyes of a wounded doe. What the Elyot-Amanda roles call for is the sort of fond nonchalance and glancing asperity 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...
Five years before Elyot meets the disagreeing Sybil, and before Private Lives begins, Elyot and Amanda divorce. As the play opens, the two are newly remarried, he to Sybil (Katryn Walker), she to Victor Prynne (John Cullum). Embarrassingly enough, both couples honeymoon in Deauville. Worse yet, their respective suites share a balcony. But Elyot is as unsuited for the flighty, girlish Sybil as Amanda is for the formal, gentlemanly Victor. While Amanda and Elyot rediscover their old love. Coward argues, always humorously, that passion often blends both tenderness and hostility. And the tender and hostile moments in the Private Lives...
...performance, like her voice, is uneven. She drops octaves at will, often with little purpose, and the almost sing-song nature of her voice makes her sound at one moment girlish, at another manly. Yet often her guttural inflections serve her well, as she threatens either Sybil or Elyot. Burton fares better, for he avoids Taylor's tendency to slip into broad, overstated gestures. However, Burton's disinterested demeanor occasionally seems to reflect a boredom with his part. And his and Taylor's hostile interludes lead to the play's most unintentionally humorous moments...
Perhaps the possibilities overwhelmed Katselas. Before Amanda and Elyot battle each other, Katselas shamelessly tantalizes the audience. Years before, we learn. Amanda broke a few records over Elyot's head. So Katselas sends Taylor to the gramophone again and again to pick up a few records casually, with a suggestive tilt of her head and a furrowed brow. When Taylor and Burton finally go at it--not only with records but also pillows, and newspapers--it's as if one were watching a parody of Who's Afraid of Virginia Woolf? (though that movie was gracious enough to avoid airborne...