Word: elyote
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Coward's Lives is organized in an unusual and precarious manner for a situation comedy: a threadbare plot is sprinkled with "life-lines" (guffaw-inducing one-liners) for the major characters, Elyot Chase and Amanda Prynne, and occassional emergency appearances of the play's idiotic and insufferable secondary characters (Victor Prynne, Sybil Chase, and Louise). The first act introduces the entire plot: Amanda and Elyot, once married and later divorced, fall in love again while honeymooning with their newly found spouses, Victor and Sybil--two cretin-like characters representing the very best in English shallowness. There is no further development...
Arnott, in order to squeeze the maximum wit out of Coward's insipid manuscript, has worked out what appears to be a second-by-second computer program for verbal inflections, facial contortions, physical maneuvers, and furniture kicking. During the extensive arguments and love bouts of Elyot and Amanda, the play's spirited and engaging cynics, the precise sense of timing turns insults, cigarette lighting, and record smashing into high comic art. At times, Arnott's exhaustive direction and his actors' slavish execution reaches self-parody: it is worthwhile, during the course of the play, to study carefully the director...
Noel Coward himself acted in the London production of Private Lives is the 1930's (as Elyot), and he found it a trying, though successful, experience: "It was more tricky and full of pitfalls than anything I have ever attempted as an actor." Hutson and Lewis, as Elyot and Amanda, are a sharp, strong, and attractive duo who avoid most of Coward's worst pitfalls--abysmal dialogue, kitschy scenes, and trite psychology--and maximize Coward's well hidden strengths--the parody of English manners and social institutions, the art of verbal thrust and counterthrust, the sharp criticism of women...
...single lines of dialogue, he produced instant repartee in which talk became a blindingly fast game of inflective one-upmanship rather than a declaration of meaning or a display of passion. Even within individual lines, he inserted a word or phrase that mockingly deflated the emotion it expressed. Thus Elyot says to Amanda in Private Lives: "You're looking very lovely in this damned moonlight, Amanda." Repeated time and again, this approach almost makes Coward the granddaddy of cool...
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...