Private Lives

Reviews

The Stage August 30, 2001
Theatre Workshop
Volcano Classic: Private Lives

Some theatre just has to be seen regardless of all personal preferences. This is most certainly such a production.

Volcano Theatre Company is steadily becoming a modern classic itself with its unique brand of visually and emotionally accomplished physical expression.

Add Noël Coward's poetic equivalent and you get a benchmark masterpiece.

Fern Smith, as fantastically rapturous Amanda, and Paul Davies as suave Elyot, are here complemented by young Laura Rees as charmingly unpredictable Sybil and Eric MacLennan's boyish Victor - under Gill Lyon's fast-paced direction.

Set in a dilapidated waiting room of a forlorn mental health institution, the play is a perfect attempt at turning a nonchalant romantic comedy inside out to expose the manically obsessive, gut-spilling, deeply tortured narrative that it really is.

The production's retro-inspired design, however, doesn't settle for Oxfam couture. Managing to fuse together carpet-lifting, tap-dancing, Led Zeppelin and most exquisite opera singing into a coherent aesthetic code - it restricts any unsettling disharmony to a thoroughly considered interpretation of the play.

It is ultimately the unfortunate love quadrangle that falls apart into a quartet of rejects in most profound solitude and yearning, making Coward acutely relevant 70 years later.

Duska Radosavijevic Heaney

Evening Standard Thursday, 30 August 2001
The Toast of the Fringe

Ironically, while up-and-coming writers like Gregory Burke and Abi Morgan were causing sensations at the Traverse with Gagarin Way (at the National in October) and Tiny Dynamite, a rather more established writer provided one of the end-of-Festival gems. The Volcano Theatre Company will be bringing Thomas Bernhard's Destination to the Riverside Studios this November, but for their Edinburgh showcase they decided to focus on Noël Coward's Private Lives, subverting the martini-inspired elegance with a disturbingly physical take on the play's emotional tensions.

The company takes the two honeymooning couples - Elyot and Sybil, and Victor and Amanda - and places them on a set more reminiscent of an Eastern European spa than a French hotel. Famously the couples' honeymoons are both doomed to end in divorce, but instead of letting the poison work itself out verbally, the cast crawl over and savage each other and make love with the uninhibitedness of chimps.

It is an anarchic take which reinvents the play's power by playing each emotion out to its extremes. The company's new recruit, Laura Rees, stands out, with a luminous, angry stage presence that should ensure her a prominent place on directors' casting-lists in the future.

Rachel Halliburton

The Scotsman Saturday, 25th August 2001
Private Lives at the Edinburgh Festival Fringe
Rating: * * * *

There's something fitting about the fact that Volcano Theatre have been forbidden, after a wrangle with the Coward estate, from publicising the fact that their current show is a production of Noel Coward's Private Lives. On one hand, it's infuriating to have to describe the show only as "a Volcano classic". On the other, at least the enigmatic title helps avoid the rage, disappointment, misery and angst that this production would no doubt cause to traditional Coward fans.

For what Volcano are offering, in their famous physical theatre style, is a rip-roaring, stereotype-smashing, mind-blowing deconstruction of Coward's text, which cuts straight through the play's traditional veneer of highly polished 1930s elegance to the raw cat-fight of sexual desire, jealousy and antipathy at its core. Set against a scruffy background of bleak frosted-glass booths like a prison or an asylum, it essentially grafts the roaring, sparkling material of Coward's text on to a background that reeks of the world of 2001, the music, the clothes, the body language, the knowledge of sexual violence, and the sleazy Big Brother culture of sexual boredom and voyeurism.

It toys with the shifting identities of the four lovers, occasionally dwells with a shuddering chill on the play's intimations of mortality, and suggests - through the forlorn, ever-present figures of the abandoned Victor and Sybil - that betrayal in love is not really a joke and can truly drive vulnerable people mad.

Why all this works so well is hard to say. Perhaps it's that the brittle sexual decadence of Coward's affluent characters has more in common with our own time than we think. Perhaps it's because this production has the nerve to bring to the surface the brutality and madness present at the core of this play; perhaps it's because the production never loses its sense of humour, its feeling for the sheer vibrancy of Coward's lines. But at any rate, it's a thrilling and thought-provoking experience, featuring terrific performances from Paul Davies and Fern Smith as Elyot and Amanda; catch its final performance today.

Joyce McMillan

The Western Mail 31 March 2001
Private Lives by Noel Coward. Dolman Theatre, Newport

Very few people, opines one of Noel Coward's characters, are really normal deep down in their private lives. And Volcano Theatre is really just not in the business of portraying normal people - or indeed respecting reputations.

So poor Mr Coward gets taken at his word as the Swansea company sets to work exposing the fragility of the bourgeoisie. The premiere of this latest production from what has become one of Wales's leading theatre groups was bizarre enough. You could hardly choose a more unlikely venue than the home of Newport Playgoers, whose standard fare would be just the sort of modern classic Volcano delight in deconstructing. The irony seemed to have escaped amdram aficionados, alas, and only four people walked out as knickers were removed, the young heroine tap-danced desperately and two men in underpants fought each other carrying easy chairs to the sounds of Led Zeppelin as a sedate story of two sets of lovers degenerated into chaos.

The original Private Lives, for those who know it, is miraculously still there (the text is faithfully adhered to) but Volcano's manic deconstruction work with guest director Gill Lyon turns an affectionate satire into a hilarious debunking. Of course there's a political purpose to their physical farce but the show actually is very, very funny. It marks a defiant return to form and glorious proof that thoughtful, provocative theatre can also be accessible and utterly enjoyable.

It also marks the impressive professional debut of Laura Rees, still a student at the Welsh College of Music and Drama, whose inspired performance alongside Eric MacLennan and core Volcano members Fern Smith and Paul Davies is simply a knock-out.

David Adams

Theatre in Wales, April 1 2001
Review of Volcano Theatre's Private Lives

Theatre Clwyd did a production of Private Lives in their last season. While it would have been theatrical treachery to have supported a company which refuses to admit to the existence of most serious Welsh playwrights it wouldn't have occurred to me, anyway, to go and see a Noel Coward play. Which is, perhaps a little unfair as I don't know that much about Coward - mostly what he represents: an unashamedly, bourgeois theatre culture which has dominated and still dominates the Welsh.

Which brings me back to Theatre Clwyd and, as it happens this reviewing on the web business. I am about to give an unequivocally positive review for Volcano Theatre Company's production. It will be positive because I only want to review plays I like. I don't see any reason to review something I didn't like. Now if, by accident I had found myself in the audience for Theatr Clwyd's production, I wouldn't have reviewed it. I wouldn't have reviewed it, not because I might have been afraid of being seen scabbing but because I don't like what the play in their production would have represented. Simple as that.

It's interesting that in all the talk about culture in the New Wales, that place which ought to be the central arena of cultural expression - the theatre - is so dominated by the non-Welsh, I mean, specifically, the values of the English middle-classes. If you want to colonise a nation bloodlessly, get into their theatres. Better still, if they have a language which is historically an expression of their culture, learn that language and use it to sneak your own values in.

Wales is becoming a nation of English middle-class values introduced through the medium of Welsh. Volcano Theatre is a Welsh company with an international reputation. This production is a Welsh version of an English play. It's great. In the volcanic energy which displaces the decorum of the original, you have layers of meaning revealed where meaning was hard to find at all. The lava flow is orgasmic but unashamed and passionate unlike those hidden by Coward's text where you can imagine his characters wanking, off. It is a play which belongs mostly to the time of its origins but it still gets done as he intended (Theatr Clwyd) and big middle-class audiences identify with the evasiveness and dissimulation.

Of course there's irony and there's anger lurking behind the lines, it's just that when the anger is manifested - as you see in the Volcano production - you see how absurd and petty the whole thing is. The journey from King Oedipus to Private Lives is not one of soaring, transcendental aestheticism. Basically it's meaningless and what this production does is focus on that meaninglessness and make the comedy out of that. And so they've made Ben Jonson out of the play of some obscure, Elizabethan poetaster.

The serious side of the production is in its discussion of language and in the argument presented to the audience between what's said and what you see: an argument which is essential for the debate that makes audiences moral (which you don't get in Theatr Clwyd's amoral theatre). Often speeches are delivered at such a pace that they're deprived of any meaning. Words themselves no matter how beautifully or wittily strung out are no guarantee of meaning or truth. Coward was a master, say, of structure. But Coward wasn't Wilde whose inversion and ironies and paradoxes are made devastating by being so affectionate. In fact, Coward is like his heir Mike Leigh who, with limited talent, ends up offering his characters as just plain stupid to those not predisposed to sympathise with the problems of their class. Because of that, as with Leigh, there is a kind of exploitation of the human and, as with the culte de la blague, in which humour is used for fascism there is very much the odour of the vicious about them.

Paradoxically, perhaps, Volcano's production is almost affectionate to the characters. The cast - Eric Maclennan, Paul Davies, Fern Smith and Laura Rees is brilliant: athletic, multi-talented (Laura Rees does a great tap-dance in the ruins), and with superb timing. There are moments which reminded me of that great Theatre de la Mezzanine show I saw in the Restless Gravity season where there are no words. Ultimately, Volcano succeed in making a meaningless language wordless and performance eloquent.

Dic Edwards
www.theatre-wales.co.uk



Edinburgh Fringe Website

Total sizzling satisfaction

Coward's Privates Lives in Volcano Theatre's production is astonishing, audacious theatre that takes this standard and puts back the guts and passion Coward could only hint at in his day.

In a highly physical performance the four actors provide a vibrant text of body movements while speaking Coward's lines naturally, rescuing the whole play and the playwright from the safe drawing room some theatre companies want to make him sit in, subdued by polite society. The set is ambivalent, anything from a hospital day room to the original Hotel balcony. Actors appear, disappear from beach hut- like cubicles. Sometimes as Elyot and Amanda revel below in their baser instincts Sybil and Victor retreat to the cubicle roofs alone. These two are buffeted in the wakes created by the enormous selfishnesses of their new spouses, Elyot and Amanda, who hurtle in front drugging and dragging one another in their lust.

This production is such dark fun too, as we see what fools we mortals be as we blind ourselves to the stark nature of others, and scrabble about seeking that wild abandonment we get addicted to. In this interpretation the parallels with Albee's Who's Afraid of Virginia Woolf and Strindberg's The Dance of Death make clear that Coward was more than the light social dramatist he is so often uninspiringly produced as. Coward's Private Lives is graphically about abuse and this production makes that erotically, lustily clear. There's hedonistic, high-kicks acting by Paul Davis and Fern Smith as Elyot and Amanda and Eric MacLennan as Victor and Laura Rees as Sybil are highly effective as bewildered weaklings caught up in Amanda and Elyot's maelstrom.

I gather that at present this production from the Wales based company has not got into up-tight England, I hope that the disturbing passion of Volcano's Private Lives erupts into that land and satisfies as it liberates. Definitely a Good's Great and the best reinterpretation of a classic I have seen.

Thelma Good
www.edfringe.com
24 August 2001