Good evening and welcome to our first torch post-show conversation.
It's Thursday, the 3rd of March 2022, and we're in the Bar Oxford Playhouse before tonight's performance of No Coward's Private Lives,
starring Patricia Hodge and Nigel Havers.
It's a new production directed by Christopher Luskin and the inaugural show from Nigel Havers own production company.
If you're not familiar with the play, here's a quick rundown from the marketing company.
Elliott's and Amanda, who were once married, find themselves on honeymoon with their new partners in the same hotel on the French coast,
admiring the view from adjoining balconies in their initial horror quickly evaporates and soon Hasharon cocktails.
Who knows what the future holds now?
The play was written by 20th century British playwright Noel Coward, who played the role of Eliot's in the original production in 1930.
We'll be joined later by Dr Seuss. Altus and Professor Kerstin Shepherd are no strangers to the Oxford purchasing.
We'll be discussing their take on the production. For now, it's time to take your seats and wait for the curtains.
Go up on private lives. OK, so it's now after the show.
I'm here with sauce and pests, and OK, so we've seen it.
It was a big production, a lavish production, quite spectacular set that said that we can't show that to people who are going to be listening to this.
But and so Stewart to us off by just telling us a little bit.
If you don't mind about private lives, about private life, written and produced in 1930, written by khallad very, very quickly, while he was,
if I remember at each other in Hong Kong, Singapore, and he said he had this vision of Gertrude Lawrence in a white mullaney gown in the moonlight.
And that's what it all came from. He absolutely wrote it for her.
And it's it's perfect for her.
In that said, so part of what I was feeling as I watched it tonight was just how how sexy as a role Amanda
is that kind of vibrancy and ruthlessness and energy and kind of charisma that's in that room.
So cold, but interesting character. He acted with Gertrude Line, followed by then.
They've been friends ever since they met at the age of, I think, 13, when they played in angelic chorus,
it back happening cruise and promptly threw up, apparently very angelic.
So they've been very close friends and collaborators in lots of ways through that and how talked about how a little known he said.
It was a cheat because it's a play in which Victor and Sybil, the spouses they dump, are really very, very second string roles.
And he said I was against Eliot and Amanda, and then he said the court room was written.
You said that really only one role. So it's really interesting that there's a sense in which they're like that.
The I mean, almost like a kind of platonic. That I do, you know, atomic creatures,
Plato's Symposium and the idea of the the beings that you have four legs and four arms and then get split in half.
Yeah, except the hole that they never quite make a hole, but nor are they complete without each other.
Yeah, and it's interesting.
I think I was just looking at that, that introduction you wrote that you wrote where he said that thing about the characters,
the secondary characters being wooden and they're just not what, you know, he he sort of charmingly says, I really wrote terrible secondary rule.
But he said he because he acted and wasn't he? Yeah, yeah.
So he played. He played earlier. Judge Gertrude Learning played Amanda.
Yeah. And Laurence Olivier and Laurence Olivier played Victor.
And that's because he said Victor has to be very attractive to explain why Amanda would have married him.
So the idea that Victor's this kind of desperately unstrap, you know, he's the kind of boorish, boring one that was played by Laurence Olivier.
Yeah, but it's interesting because I think in this piece where he charmingly lays out the
background to the play and he quotes himself for not having written parts very well.
But he says he was a great director or something like that if he were not playwright.
So he he gets in and out of the role of playwright and actor. You know, he's doing both with the.
So he's as an actor. I think he's saying, well, I wish the play had been better written,
something like that and pointed out because I think I don't said I know which is a bit better written.
I think he means I wish I'd been more generous. That's exactly right.
Coaching roles for himself in all his major comedies, yeah, right,
said the very first choice of the vortex instead of hay fever in which play he first wanted produce was because the Vortex had a great role for him,
and he didn't in the same way. Yeah, oh yeah. All all of his major comedies are perfect roles for him,
so I think when he's saying I didn't bother much with Victor in Seville, he's like, Yeah, because he really impressed.
So it's not. Yeah, I don't think he's admitting any flaws in the play. I think you're just saying it.
It's a bit ungenerous and, you know, spreading out the charm. Yeah.
Oh, I know. But I mean, it's I kept thinking about Oscar Wilde when we talked about this earlier that I just kept hearing his indebtedness to Wilde.
And yet you were saying he wasn't. Actually, that's one really interesting, said Coward says after hay fever, which is his hugely successful comedy.
He says, You know, I got this kind of reputation for wit.
We've actually, if you go through the play contains great witticisms like which get the biggest laughs like this.
Haddock is disgusting, and the lines from private lives that are really famous are things like very flat Norfolk.
Oh yeah, which is sort of funny when Amanda says it, but utterly unfamiliar to me that you have.
It's that you had to be that joke. Oh, the [INAUDIBLE] about you even make it sound like it's Sybil thought.
She says, Well, it wasn't that she made it flatter, but it's like, you know, you can't cut off, be murdered.
The love you both could get the the timing exactly right, but it's got to be in context.
So whereas whereas with Wilde, you were saying, you know, I was writing this sort of epic dramatic language, I don't think it is epic romantic.
It's perfectly paced. It's if I was really noticing the first act, there's nothing beyond two or three lines.
I mean the bit when Elliot does, you know how beautiful you can withstand moonlight?
Yeah, that's about six lines, and it feels like a kind of epic speech compared to these tiny to and fro.
Yeah, that's true. But they're not with waltz plays, the reviews used to kind of control the the witticism.
Yeah, and they were like takeaways, you know? Well, they're all those that get stuck on people's of and all the rest of counts.
Lines aren't stuck on details and they might help you. But I keep hearing those patterns.
So you'll have a composition about men and women. It's all about men and women and kind of wisdom about about the sexes.
And it's the same. They do claim something very well.
Women are always excited and then it's well, men are always, but it's always the first one organised.
And that's it. I mean, in one sense, Amanda's mocking that.
I mean, I was realising how much fun exactly that men and women's roles and so on the play and we kind of complete takes apart.
It's kind of gender roles in some ways. I mean, it's 1933, and I love the way he talks about how, you know,
Victor will sort of, you know, well, Victor will give you what form and analysis it's.
I'll screen if he does. I don't see, you know. So there's also the bit where he says he said, Oh, something, it's really not not right.
If she has affairs, if she catches him out on that, absolutely. She says mine would let me go.
Nibble on my caraway biscuit. Yeah, my crew. Yeah, it's a kind of it's a great, very modern moment.
Yeah, it really works now. Yeah. Oh, well, if he knows with the audience when she's, you know, when he said, Well, yes, but it's different for women.
And how cool is it? Yeah, yeah. I was like a Panopto anyway, so I wondered if I could ask you about how you felt.
If it played in the house tonight, it was a full house. Oh, you know, being where we are and I'm reopening and all of those kind of things.
What does that do for you to be in that kind of auditorium? It's lovely.
I think I think in some ways how much the audience enjoyed it was really moving people.
Yeah, I mean, there's laughter, right? From kind of the second line or something like that.
Well, I hadn't realised how much. It wasn't just that I missed theatre, but I miss comedy being in a room, laughing at something in so much.
It's so joyful to have them back and immediate lots of people.
And I can remember once going to a what was it called carry on.
Tell me it was that. It was that play that was a redo, it was sort of about the carry on films don't play.
It was a farce by Terry Johnson. I think the what was then the politics beneath it, a huge short term sum sold no tickets at all.
It was actually pretty good. But nobody people smiled.
They didn't laugh. Yeah, it's really unusual. But. Whereas you get a certain sort of critical mass.
Yeah. And people laugh. Yeah. And it's a wonderful like that full auditorium.
And I think there was that much more laughter because it sort of freaks you out, really.
I think it's very rare. You laugh on your own out loud and it's weirdly in company.
Do? So I think there's a kind of human really infectious. And I felt that the actors were right from the beginning.
It was they were really responding. I mean, they're such expert actors and they were just really warming to the whole experience.
And maybe it's I wonder what it was like for actors in this whole period of they're not having the love.
Yeah. And getting back into that must be such a thrill. Well, it's incredibly hard.
I mean, the other thing is doing the the kind of Zoom theatre stuff, etc. and it's like, we find it hard enough lecturing.
But the idea of performing is absolute silence. I know what I wanted to ask, is it OK to jump in and just say, should we talk about the chain?
One of the big substantial change, which was the edge because normally I guess the script calls for them to be only five years
or five years older than I can be a bit more needs for five years since they last met,
since they first married and the sense of I'm going to is playing once and it's all about you.
But because it's second marriage and because there aren't the mention of ages, it's really interesting.
It's been revived so many times by people, you know, way past. So if it was done in 1930, then Coward was thirty one.
Yeah, you know, that was I was really young.
Yeah, yeah, it was one of the very, very early roles. So it it's in many ways a young play.
It's about that's the whole thing is when I mean, it's a line to play very differently.
So yeah, I mean, Patricia Hodge looks fantastic, but when she says, I feel like I'm crumbling away and that's me, she's like 30 until crumbling.
But also when somebody refers to somebody else as a baby, a mere baby.
Yeah, it takes on a different meaning when that person is, you know, 50 as opposed to 25 or 30.
So there's an interesting thought.
I mean, it's an interesting one, and it still works with older actors because there's no sense in which the whole point at the end of the play,
it's you don't think they're going to change out, you know, it's all going to endlessly repeat.
So the idea that they behaving exactly the same in 50 years time is entirely believable.
Yeah, yeah.
You know, whether they're 30, you probably shouldn't speculate on the underlying term because we were just talking with your students earlier.
I think some of them were mentioning about things like the domestic violence and the
some of the things that we would be really uncomfortable with now are still retained.
This version was really faithful. I couldn't detect very much cutting or changing lines.
And you know, the play better. I can't. I can't.
There's a line that they drew the line when I can't remember it happening is the one where, yes, actually.
She asked how old Sybil is. Oh yeah. And he says, and they say, Yeah, yeah.
However old, he said. I think he said something like 20s. Yeah, maybe three or something like that.
There's all you've really run out, which obviously with that cap of an age difference would be,
yeah, that would be too much of a problem I could go against. Yeah, that was one moment.
There were a few, yes, but they were sort of necessary given the casting, whereas thought everything else was retained.
But even then, culturally insensitive things about the world trip and Daniel Day in the village and things like that.
Yeah, but it just it just struck me that some of the things like the violence and the hitting, you know,
hitting a woman and all these things are there played for laughs and I was anxious going to see it,
whether I would be laughing and whether how would I take that? So I actually wanted it a bit more.
Go for it. Did you look? I mean, all that kind of.
Well, not not a really sinister level. I mean, it should be retaining the comedy, but more the sense of, well, partly they were very obviously staged.
Yeah. And the slap was so obvious stations that it wasn't that it was as though they were
sort of wary of even doing a staged slap that didn't look like an obviously stage.
Yeah. Whereas actually, I think with similar victor they got.
It was an interesting choice. I think they got several and Victor's argument much more full on than any of Amanda's.
Yeah, which is an interesting, well, the stage directions in which Elliott and Amanda fight really,
really went on on the floor and punching each other must have completely wrecked the apartment.
Yeah. Yeah. It's sort of like cut off before it, really? Yeah.
Full on. And actually, I think I mean, it's interesting this the students who are studying it.
I gave it kind of that was to get the weird look back in anger.
Oh yeah. Taste of honey.
I can't even remember the other ones that were in there, but that sense of actually put it next to things like, Oh, I'm east is east,
which has actually really quite really disturbing kind of violence in that and where it stops being funny at that moment.
Yeah. Mm hmm. But there was a sense in which they kind of sensed that kind of love, hate,
difficult relationship, the kind of the way to which none of those plays were romanticising it.
There was a kind of, I mean, sort of emotional viciousness. In many ways that's behind, Oh, look back in anger.
Yeah. The other thing that struck me as I was watching it was actually how even.
It is between Elliot, and I'm not going to say because she gets it right back.
Oh, he initiated by hitting her, but she wallops him eventually.
What does the record over the head and all that? Yeah. So she's absolutely giving it back, and she says that.
Do you remember how to play her? She announces, No, no, no. I give it right back to him.
I can take care of myself. Yeah, ta to. Yeah. And there's no question about that.
Yeah. And I think you kind of seeing that give and take. Well, you know, so be it.
Absolutely. I think and I think that equality in the relationship kind of shifts it in other ways.
And he put it next to something might look back in anger where there's not the same physical violence.
But another way, I mean, I'm fascinated by private lives is a play that goes around in circles.
I mean, it's kind of I mean, it's fundamentally not that different from waiting for Godot in structure.
Yeah. It goes nowhere. They sit around talking. They do nothing.
In lots of ways, it's a play about passing the time in a co-dependent, dysfunctional, in some ways, relationships.
So actually. Waiting for Godot was Fatima. Arrestable relationship is an interesting one,
and yet it's actually compared to look back in anger where the way that that
relationship works is thanks to her having lost her baby thanks to a miscarriage,
thanks to her being sterile. You know, there's a kind of despairing and I think sort of fundamentally quite misogynist view,
which I would not in a million years, you know, said no violence in private lives, but it's it's part of their relationship.
It's not. It's not misogynistic in any way.
You know, it's so it's a really interesting study in a dysfunctional functional relationship.
But it's not about gender imbalance, it's not about exploitation, which I think it's pretty rare.
Yeah. And it's interesting what you said about the wedding, because did you notice with the the blocking that that act,
whether it's building toward the big and the big fight?
But there's so much just kind of somebody sits on the sofa and just stares
out into space and is watching the other just waiting for some kind of power.
They're sort of like caged animals. Yeah, circling. Yeah, but pretending to be occupied.
But really,
they're just kind of holding a pillow or smoking a cigarette or doing something that's just passing the time and watching each other all the time.
They're always aware of what the other one is do, and that's how it was done really beautifully.
Yeah, I mean, in that sense, the blocking was part of the community like this.
Don't marry each other in some. Oh, yeah, absolutely. And actually, this afternoon, I was talking to Joe,
who here who was saying she was thinking after watching it, she was just thinking, I just need a job.
You know. Yeah, well, it's the moment where he picks up a book like his second.
Oh, but actually, if they have something to do? Yeah, it might work, but they haven't.
And it's actually in that sense, I don't think it's accidental because Coward is not an admirer of the idle rich.
You know, it can look good. And I think it's that I love.
I mean, that's what Pinter admired and coward's plays. And what counted more than Pinto's was objectivity that both they both use the same term.
I don't think they'd sort of read each other saying it with each other.
But the ways in which they depict the characters they represent, but they don't ask you to admire them.
They don't hold them up as anything but just what they are. Yeah. And coward.
You know, there's a point in this. I think I found it in the 19 late 1950s writing in this journal.
You know, the the idle rich are always will be and always have been fundamentally boring.
You know? But I think that you're going to be amused by them to be entertained by them with that.
But he's not saying that great. But then the interesting thing is when they start playing music,
every time there's music and she starts singing and he's playing the piano, if something happens there, they get the chemistry back.
There's something we see that connects them. And it's when they're not talking.
So I wonder, is that really built into the play I can remember? It's interesting.
I think I think they extended that. So partly Patricia Hodge, I remember doing I can't remember county custody.
It was called.
So it was a sort of review that was done in the West End for quite a while of just a sort of melee of snippets from the plays and sketches.
And so, yeah, OK. Yeah. So she kind of.
So I think that was yeah, that was partly of we've got we've got somebody who's an absolute master of this.
Yeah, give them a bit more time. So you think possibly. I think that I don't know the second act songs, certainly being quite as extended as that.
So I think that was partly but everything about Gertrude Lawrence wasn't.
She also, didn't she? Yeah, there was a lot. Yeah, absolutely.
So it is a vehicle for that. But it's interesting you say not when they're talking because there's a great article by Frances Grey in that.
Oh yeah. Look back in pleasure. Collection of essays on it.
And she talks about the idea that with when people sort of come together as lovers in coward's place,
she likens it to Fred Astaire and Ginger Rogers dancing.
And the moment where there's almost like a little hiccup and they come into sync.
Yeah, and that's that that there's a sense in which there's a sort of verbal game that they play and then
they know exactly and you get it in the balcony scene at the beginning when he turns to her and says,
You know, there's not a bit of you, I don't know. Yeah. And so and when he said, is there any doubt about it?
And she says, no. And so on. And there's a sense which it's it's always been there that in sync with each other or, you know,
once they start writing each other and then exactly what they mean, exactly how they used language.
So yeah, there's it's interesting, but that's also when it all comes off the rails.
Yeah, because we have between Fred and Ginger movies like Shall We Dance?
The whole thing hinges on it, actually, because they fight like banshees when they're not dancing.
And then the minute they're gladiatorial, Beatrice and Benedick. Yeah.
You know, some of the restoration companies that fantastic, just that sense of hostility that, you know, masked is great.
And then when they're done bothering you? Yeah. Verbal sparring.
And then when they don't, they just it's very gratifying and satisfying to kind of feel that in sync happening.
But I think there's a question in place when you get a kind of verbal dance if you sentence and you get physical dance,
but you also get the speaking the same language, understanding each that.
I mean, there's a lot of that. It's in that sense is very Shakespearean to the idea of the characters when they are equals, that playing that game,
which is absolutely ambitious mandate, which is so enjoyable to witness because you see you're seeing that,
that verbal sparring with it, it's like, Wow, then these I mean,
they're just holding their own version and they're able to have a bit of distance from the conversation as well and formulate everything beautifully.
But I do. I keep coming back to what. But I did think I kept seeing Gwendolyn and Cecily, for example.
And you know? Yes, absolutely. Do you take your coffee and shall I call your men?
Do you know this kind of this this complete performance?
Well, while they're pretending to be socially well behaved, that they're really reserved for both wild and casual.
There are so many semi playwrights writing comedies of manners whether.
Really about much more like this sort of restoration ones where the people, the people who know how to master manners.
In some ways are the insiders versus the sets who don't know how to, you know, the kind of let the ones who want the aristocrats.
Yeah, all the time. You don't like the game. Yes.
But there are a lot of plays also where it's about good manners, good good manners, a good heart.
So good that counts. But none of that.
You know when when Amanda says a I've got values like, you know, being kind to people will depends on which people say,
Oh, well, then you know, she said something like giving money to beggar women.
So they did change that line. I mean, it ends up being kind to people.
Yeah. But so there were maybe this will also help.
Well, she's been. That's kind of I wrote, You like helping little old lady? Yeah, yeah.
But it's just away with the cash cow. It was an outsider.
I mean, certainly, you know, celebrity that brought him into it. His success?
Yeah, he was spend a lot of time and parties given by, you know, the rich and aristocratic and all the rest of it as the kind of brutal entertainment.
I think of him very much treated like that. Yeah.
You know, you were going to wield whatever money and you certainly find it very, very rude of the time and it's very unimpressed by it.
And I think in the same way the world is Irish in England, that's well as great.
Yes, I think that's an outsider's view on how that system works.
Is that brilliantly familiarising? Yeah, manners. So it's just very slightly off kilter.
And then that's where Wilde would never have this, of course.
But the reference to making strange noises after you've eaten for him and everyone just sort of, you know, it's a terrible moment.
Oh, he's he's he's broken some rule.
But Nigel Haber is playing in a kind of gleeful way.
Yeah, it's completely just, I'm loving this. Yeah, but it's a moment that we're wild, doesn't really go.
He doesn't go over this line. One of the some ways that something like that, but I think it's it's a different way of doing it.
So what world does I think has people who use the manners so deliberately all the time?
And when there's violence in wild, it's broken down in some ways,
but also it goes towards melodrama that if you sort of mean the Lord with, you know, been calling on.
Calling his ex lover, mother of his child.
This is about calling her, you know, calling his son her, you know, about police and the [INAUDIBLE] and the rest of it.
She faces love. Yeah, that's a sense which he's lost it at that moment.
Yeah. So yeah, I think that sense of manners being about power is very strongly that with while I
think cowered in some ways is interested in manners is etiquette and what you can get,
where you and what you can get away with. And he's in some ways pushing against also what you can do in the theatre.
Hmm. So how much bad behaviour can have that bad behaviour includes?
I mean, I love the way that the play doesn't age because in one sense, there will never be a time when it is OK to dump your bride on the honeymoon.
You know it's going to happen. It's going to happen. W yeah, exactly.
It's. So it's a wonderful kind of the fact that you know, he's it so well, but you you fundamentally don't care about them very, very quickly.
So that whole thing of how can you judge Amanda when actually fun sibling victory?
Immensely annoying. Very, very quickly. Oh, it's really interesting.
He writes. He's using a form that's usually quite moral and usually about sorting the good from the bad,
either according to manners or according to morals or something.
And he he breaks all the rules and you need comedy. What do you mean?
What form will come with you? I suppose I mean comedy. I also mean theatre at that point.
I mean, comedy so often what the standard form of so often in comedy is.
There are the older generation is booking the younger generation.
In this case, the older generation, it's going to be like dumping younger generations.
Know, though, that as we said, that generation gap isn't necessarily meant to be there.
But do you sort of mean not love in that play? Is outside the rules?
Hear a Catholic, which is they don't recognise the so they're still married.
But in that sense, it's not so to mean that marriage in I mean,
he basically takes the most fun one, the most fundamental kind of social bonding structure,
the institution and so on, and sort of reverses all its families in some ways or just cast its aside as irrelevant.
Yes.
So yes, if in that sense, he's taking some of the most fundamental rules of the genre and then turning them into something a little bit different?
Yeah, that might be a note to end on. Sadly, we've run out of time,
but it's been absolutely brilliant here in both of you kind of having this discussion straight off the back of the energy of watching it.
So thank you so much for giving us time for this tonight. Thank you.
Yes, and thank you. Thank you. I.