Belinda Cornish and Josh Meredith in Private Lives, Teatro Live! Photo by Marc J Chalifoux

By Liz Nicholls, 12thnight.ca

“I think that very few people are completely normal really, deep down in their private lives….” argues Amanda in Noel Coward’s 1930 comedy of (bad) manners, the season finale at Teatro Live!. It’s a declaration on behalf of entitlement, personal exceptionalism, liberation from convention.

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And Amanda (Belinda Cornish) and Elyot (Josh Meredith), the charming monsters of Private Lives, not only use it as a barricade against the vulgar world and its disillusionments, but weaponize it against each other, too. Five years into their divorce, they meet again on adjoining French Riviera hotel balconies (designer: Chantel Fortin), honeymooning with ‘normal’, and hence entirely unsuitable, spouses.

The flammable love/hate that burnt their marriage to the ground instantly bursts into flame again. And they up and leave together: they flee to Paris, abruptly leaving in the lurch a couple of perplexed new spouses and the chaos they’ve created. Clearly they can neither live with nor without each other. Neither calm nor its opposite can sustain them; both are ominous.

Coward’s comedy is a very particular combination of the breezy and the sharp: cool teasing wit on top, heat underneath. And it’s tricky to pull off. Not least because of the idiomatic verbal dexterity it requires, but the full-blooded way Amanda and Elyot knock each other around the stage. And Max Rubin’s production is at pains to give full weight to the play’s double-sidedness about passion and fury, without Private Lives turning into Who’s Afraid of Noel Coward?. For the benefit of Victor, Amanda remembers their marriage as “two violent acids bubbling about in a nasty little matrimonial bottle.” And yet, self-destructive impulses rule her life.

Priya Narine, Garett Ross, Josh Meredith, Belinda Cornish in Private Lives, Teatro Live! Photo by Marc J Chalifoux.

For his part Elyot’s defence against residual guilt, both present and retrospective, is flippancy. “You mustn’t be serious my dear one; it’s just what they want … all the futile moralists who try to make life unbearable.” You could haul out the term dysfunctional, I guess, for the central relationship in this romantic “comedy” with its dark, acidic anti-romantic stance. But it’s dysfunction that is, in every way, high-functioning.

In Cornish, Rubin’s production has a star Amanda, quick-witted and elegant, who knows exactly how to time and toss off Coward’s witticisms so that the little barbs are funny, generated with high style, and stick (lightly) to all the available surfaces of the play. It’s a captivating performance, bright charm with a cutting edge. Amanda is incurably, chronically, arch, but this is a performance that reveals hints underneath of the vulnerability of the truly directionless.   

If Meredith, new to the Varscona stage, doesn’t quite have the suave and teasing crunch that makes so Elyot irresistibly maddening, to his ex-wife and to us, his boyish sulkiness at high-pressure moments is amusing. Together they have contiguous exasperation thresholds, and in Rubin’s production, the way insignificant remarks become momentous — a Cowardly insight into volatile relationships — is always convincing.

Priya Narine and Garett Ross in Private Lives, Teatro Live!. Photo by Marc J Chalifoux.

As the rejected spouses, who are designed to be irritating foils to the main event, constantly demanding reprises of the failed marriage, Priya Narine and Garett Ross bring some originality to their performances under Rubin’s direction. Victor isn’t a dope; he’s touchingly gallant in his conventional way, genuinely baffled by a wife who says things like “darling, don’t be vehement” to him.” Sybil, in Narine’s performance, has the kind of grating vivacity that brings out the worst in Amanda. And, with a supply of outrage at hand, she cracks off a few choice insults of her own that are, inevitably, no match for the effortless throwaways of her “rival.”

Everyone looks divine in Leona Brausen’s frocks and suits. And the Mediterranean lighting by Narda McCarroll locates us in an improbable world of a funny comedy that isn’t comical — in which love is both the subject, and the problem. 

REVIEW

Private Lives

Theatre: Teatro Live!

Written by: Noel Coward

Directed by: Max Rubin

Starring: Belinda Cornish, Josh Meredith, Priya Narine, Garett Ross

Where: Varscona Theatre, 10329 83 Ave.

Running: through July 28

Tickets: teatroq.com