Noël Coward’s 1930 play, revived by Her Productions just a couple of months before another production comes to the Royal Exchange across town, is famous for its balance of comedy and malice. At its centre are acrimoniously divorced couple Amanda and Elyot, who bump into each other while honeymooning with their new spouses. Soon the fierce love that first brought them together has rekindled and they abscond together, initiating a dangerous dance of desire and violence.
Both the play and director Amy Gavin’s production are at their best when trembling on the knife-edge between carnality and cruelty. After a gratingly broad first act introduces us to the protagonists and their insipid new partners, things settle when we arrive in Amanda and Elyot’s Parisian bolthole and get drawn into their tumultuous relationship. Here there’s a sense of how quickly love can sour into contempt, as the pair alternately sizzle and spar, a slap never far from a kiss. Gavin’s intervention of projecting recorded images from the couple’s stormy marriage on the surface behind them unnecessarily hammers home what we can already see playing out.
The strongest performance is from Her Productions’ artistic director Hannah Ellis Ryan as Amanda, her sophisticated sheen barely concealing a restless, prowling energy that’s unleashed when she reunites with Elyot. While Charlie Nobel doesn’t quite capture the charm that draws his ex-wife so irresistibly back to him, there’s a fizzing chemistry between the two that boils over into something more ugly. Played purely for laughs, Hope Yolanda’s twitchy Sybil and Jack Elliot’s decent-but-dull Victor seem like creatures from another world, wrenching the play back into the realm of awkward comedy when they interrupt their spouses’ love-hate tryst.
Gavin has clearly made a choice to amp up the brutality with some wince-inducing instances of violence. These then sit jarringly alongside the play’s comic moments, which sometimes veer into the cartoonish. By pressing too hard on extremes this version sacrifices nuance and detail, struggling to make a case for why we should still care about Coward’s play almost a hundred years on.
• At Hope Mill theatre, Manchester, until 8 February; then The Dukes, Lancaster, from 24-28 February
