A Private Lives for the 1990s was how one critic described Patrick Marber's 1997 play Closer - and the truth of that assertion is clearly demonstrated in Jonathan Church's inspired pairing of the contemporary play with Noel Coward's 1930s classic. Better still, both plays are played by the same quartet of sharp young actors.
Seeing them both on the same day, as I did, not only provides a terrific theatrical away day (we go to Stratford for the history plays so why not to Birmingham for the love plays?), but reminds you that the way we love and hate now is not so very different from the way we loved and hated then. The hairstyles and the phraseology may change but not the passion or the attitudes, although Coward's play is more waspish about women and Marber's puts the boot into men.
Church is a tad unlucky that his production of Coward's brilliant edifice of wit should open in the same week as Howard Davies's London effort which - with its banishment of prewar vowel sounds and exquisite streak of sado-masochistic pain and pleasure - will change forever how we look at Coward's masterpiece.
What Church offers is a much more traditional cappuccino reading of the play; no bad thing, perhaps, in that it provides some light relief for the bleaker, more brutal Closer in which four young Londoners adrift in the anonymity of the city find that the closer they apparently get, the further apart they are.
If Private Lives charts the passions of those who find they cannot live together or apart, Closer mines the impossibility of intimacy in modern heterosexual relationships. In Private Lives, Elyot and Amanda have a shared love and a sense of fun; in Closer, the characters share nothing except sex and angst.
Church doesn't quite capture the terrible savagery or self-disgust at the heart of Marber's play, but it comes close to conveying the pain and sense of longing that infects the drama, and the production's modernity matches the spiky contemporary feel of the play.
The cast are excellent, with Carolyn Blackhouse outstanding as Anna in Closer and as Amanda in Private Lives, two women whose confident brittleness disguises a deep fragility.
Until October 27. Box office: 0121-236 4455.
