We saw Noel Coward's play, Private Lives, at the Huntington Theater on Saturday, June 9. A good cast. Sharp stage design. Good crisp delivery of the lines -- we really heard the jokes. Some of the slapstick scenes (especially when Amanda and Elyot dance and wreck their pensione after they've run off together) are quite funny.
But holy cow, this is fluff. And worse, it's repetitious fluff. If the repeated gags were taken out, we would cut twenty minutes out of the play, to its benefit. I Love Lucy, for half an hour, is great. For two hours, it's a drag.
I realize Coward wrote to give us an engaging way to spend an evening, accompanied by friends, dinner at a nice restaurant, drinks. I like all that. But I didn't find Private Lives all that engaging. The characters and their inner human convulsions and expressions of selfishness and ignorance all stand up as decent stuff for humor. But the story seems too dated and prosaic.
There must be something more to Noel Coward that I don't get, and I admit it.
