Elizabeth Newman is a deservedly popular choice to replace David Thacker when he relinquishes his artistic directorship of the Octagon in July. Assistant director at Bolton since 2009, Newman has honed her considerable skills on the theatre’s testing but rewarding in-the-round stage (as well as in the studio and with outreach work). Her new production of Noël Coward’s 1930 comedy Private Lives is not only witty and urbane but – unusually – touching and humane.
On adjoining hotel balconies a divorced husband and wife, honeymooning with new spouses, meet for the first time in five years. Elyot and Amanda are impulsive romantics; their new partners are not. This mismatch is the spring that hilariously tightens a calculated and precise plot of clockwork cool. Paradoxically, though, the relationships at its heart are messily romantic: volatile and uncontrolled, they career between extremes of affection and aggression, passing through mid-states of confusion, hope, despair and happiness. Coward’s text challenges directors to find a satisfactory balance between these two contradictory aspects. Newman meets it.
Elyot and Amanda are often presented as mondain, brittle, arch, jazz-age sophisticates. Harry Long and Fiona Hampton play them as two people trying to find their way through the turmoil of love and sexual attraction – with humour and flippancy, yes, but with feeling too. None of Coward’s caustic wit is sacrificed – the tenderness between them is communicated through the timing of their exchanges. Jessica Baglow and Niall Costigan, as the deserted spouses, hint at people who might just be about to realise they have been forced into moulds not of their making. By selecting a younger than usual cast, Newman brings an element of hope to the play: through their messy bumblings, these characters may find happy futures.
