“PRIVATE LIVES”

Wairarapa Times-Age, 18 December 1939, Page 6

“PRIVATE LIVES”

PRESENTED BY WELLINGTON THESPIANS. POPULAR PERFORMANCE AT OPERA HOUSE. As it was presented by the Wellington Thespians in the Opera House on Saturday evening, the Noel Coward comedy, 'Private Lives" was received with every indication of enjoyment by an audience that comfortably filled the theatre. The performance of the talented and well-trained company was applauded freely and heartily, as it well deserved to be. and a number of the more fantastic and uproarious passages of the comedy brought down the house.

Although it is described, with some justification so far as its details are concerned, as brilliantly written, "Private Lives,” as a play, is not particularly impressive. It deals from a modernist standpoint with problems of love and marriage, but the claim that it has something definite to say on these problems appears to lack foundation. There arc four principal characters in the play. Of these, two are a man and woman who have been married and are now divorced. They are , sophisticated and rather clever people, past the first flush of youth and with few remaining illusions. As the comedy opens, these two have each married again—the woman a commonplace and pompous man of mature age and the man a girl of simple and unsophisticated character, seven years his junior. By chance the two newly-married pairs find themselves, at the outset of their respective honeymoons, occupying rooms which open on to the same balcony of a hotel in France. Following on preliminary scenes in which the honeymoon couples are paraded separately for inspection—scenes, incidentally, in which it appears that memories of the single former marriage are a disturbing element in each of the new marriages—the former husband and wife meet and .find that they are still powerfully attracted one to another.

They make some attempts to stand up to their newly-accepted obligations and to flee temptation, but in the end elope—the man deserting his newlywedded wife and the woman her new husband. The second act finds the divorced pair living together again in Paris and alternating between tender love passages and bitter squabbling. The lastmentioned phase of their relations culminates in a disorderly physical encounter in which they exchange buffets and bangs in a manner almost worthy of the wrestling ring. While the disturbance is at its height, the deserted husband and wife arrive on the scene in company, in circumstances not very clearly explained. Following on a night of armed truce and unabated hostility, the four participants attempt on the following morning to discuss the whole position. No conclusion is reached, but the deserted husband and wife in their turn come to blows, though in less spectacular fashion than the other two. While this second combat is in progress, the two divorced persons, each taking a suitcase, depart quietly in company. There the play ends. What is supposed finally to have happened, or to be likely to happen, is left to the imagination. •

In its dialogue and detail situations, some of them developed to a point of very broad farce, the comedy has plenty of entertainment quality. As a whole, however, and by normal standards, it appears to be an inconsecutive and incoherent fragment, without beginning or end. and pointing nowhere in particular. The answer to any question thus raised may be that the comedy provides amusing entertainment, as it undoubtedly does. The cast of characters was: Sibyl Chase, Doris Mildenhall; Elyot Chase, Kenneth Fowles; Victor Prynne. Charles Johnston; Amanda Prynne. Lesley Jackson; Louise. Mollie Cummings. All members of the company were well up to their work. The four principals, in their varied -md widely contrasting characters, tv&e alike wholly convincing and effective in passages of tenderness, passion, gloom and farce. In her comparatively small part. Miss Cummings also did everything that could have been expected of her.

The play was admirably staged and produced. Incidental music was played with spirit and effect by members of the Mastertoil Orchestral Society, the overture and later items being respectively "Knightsbridge." "Sans Souci" and “Pozieres March."