Ruth Leon recommends…2 London theatre Pocket Reviews
Ruth Leon recommendsIt doesn’t hurt that she is starring, with Nigel Havers, in one of the two or three greatest comedies ever written.
Coward wrote Private Lives for Gertrude Lawrence, his oldest friend. They’d met when they were child actors in 1912 and loved each other until she died. Gertie had the perfect style but lacked technique and, according to Coward, gave a different performance every night, which drove Coward to send her infuriated telegrams even when they were playing together. (“Only thing to be fixed is your performance!”).Patricia Hodge and Nigel Havers are older than the actors who customarily play Amanda and Elyot, a divorced couple who meet some years after their divorce, while honeymooning with their new spouses, and realise that they can live neither with nor without each other. It’s a brilliant idea to play this as older but not at all wiser, just as unsuited as they were the first time, when they were young.Hodge and Havers (and their director, Chris Luscombe) have the experience and the chops to savour every single nuance of Coward’s play and a few more of their own. They look right, they sound right, they move right and, in their hands, Amanda and Elyot are the appalling, vicious, and completely wonderful couple you have always wanted to meet (but preferably on neutral ground).
I’ve seen every production of Private Lives on Broadway and the West End since Noel and Gertie died (Why? Long story I’ll tell you another time) and I can tell you that here, on the stage of the Ambassadors Theatre, is finally the production that Coward would have loved above all others. This is his Private Lives and ours.
I saw two comedic master classes this week, in totally different plays and places. One was the aforementioned Patricia Hodge in Private Lives in a big West End theatre. At the other end of the scale, at the tiny Jermyn Street Theatre, I found the impeccable and brilliant Caroline Quentin, starring alongside her daughter, Rose Quentin, in Infamous, a ramshackle but often very funny play about Lady Hamilton, mistress to Lord Nelson who, frankly, doesn’t sound like much of a catch.
April De Angelis is a favourite playwright of mine and even though Infamous runs out of steam in the second half, it is buoyed throughout by the fabulous comic turn of Caroline Quentin in two different roles with excellent support from her daughter.
The first half has Emma Hamilton (gorgeous Rose Quentin) riding high as the wife of the British Ambassador to Naples and laying plans to snare the hero of Waterloo to her bed, which we know she does, over the oft-expressed objections of her down-to-earth and down-trodden mother. This is Caroline Quentin in an askew mobcap, begging her daughter to enjoy the gilded life she has and not to aim higher, reminding her of how high she has already risen from her origins as a London prostitute.
But Emma persists and inevitably, she falls from grace into the second half of Infamous which takes place in a cow barn in Calais in which Emma (now played by Caroline in a ratty dressing gown but still full of delusions of grandeur) is living with her lovechild, Horatia (Rose). Sir William Hamilton has died, Lord Nelson has returned to his wife and then died, leaving Emma and her child, “to the nation” which, predictably, has abandoned them.
It all gets a bit muddled after that but De Angelis is never less than funny and entertaining. Best of all is the comic performance from Caroline Quentin who never sinks into cliché despite the obvious temptations. Every moment is fresh and surprising, every new idea, physical or intellectual, is a revelation from this highly skilled actor.
There are a few actors I’d watch even if they were reading the telephone directory. After seeing her in Infamous, Caroline Quentin is definitely one of them.
Nelson then Wellington? Blimey, what does she do for an encore?
Hodge is 76 and Havers is 71. Ridiculous for them to be doing Private Lives.
When Ms. Hodge was playing”the Portia of our Chambers” and Mr, Havers was running for England as Lord Lindsay, they were two of the most beautiful people on the planet. They have both aged very nicely, but I agree — their time for these particular roles is long past.
Wow, thanks for that, and I can see from all the engagement here that your “reviews” are really having a tremendous impact. I’ll be slipping this one not into my pocket but directly into the bin, but again, thanks soooo much!
Emma Hamilton snares the “hero of Waterloo”? Really? Doubt she ever met the Duke of Wellington.