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Private Lives and The Pride
Oct. 29th, 2012 09:09 pmPrivate Lives
Noel Coward, reinvented slightly for modern day – I suspect the original did not contain a stage direction about snorting cocaine off an iPad (the cocaine, possibly, but not the technology) – and with characters ostensibly from New Zealand (two of them meet at a house party in Kumeu), although enjoying the international rootlessness of the very rich. Smart, witty and completely unsympathetic; well acted, well staged (with assorted pieces of consumerism), and fabulous outfits. The songs are also updated –Elyot and Amanda share Lou Reed’s Perfect Day, rather than Someday I’ll Find You, and I had the Scissor Sisters’ Let’s Have a Kiki stuck in my head for some days afterwards. What I’m not wild about is the physical violence; played for laughs, and mostly successful, but with Sybil and Victor there’s less history and more discrepancy of size, and it’s hard to see it as anything other than assault. Still. It’s not a play where you’re supposed to like anyone, after all.
The Pride
Most of the way through this play, there’s a scene in which Phillip – a married and closeted gay man in the 1950s – is being admitted for psychiatric treatment aimed at “curing” his homosexuality through aversion therapy. It’s a bitter, painful sequence, and while the doctor overseeing the treatment is concerned entirely with Phillip’s sexual behaviour, Phillip himself tries – and fails – to ask whether the treatment will correct his love for his male partner as well.
I really liked the scene. I would have liked the play much better if it started there, rather than nearly finishing; instead, it’s more linear, for all that it moves between two timelines. It does so with the same set of characters (Phillip, his wife Sylvia and lover Oliver in 1958; Phillip and Oliver, separated due to Oliver’s preference for anonymous sex but still involved, and their straight supportive friend Sylvia in 2008), and it’s very, very talky. The characters go on – and on – about their feelings, analysing and insisting and narrating, and although the performances are excellent, the narrative never really grabbed me. I did realise at one point that two of the characters had just taken about ten minutes to get across the emotional point that the slash fic I’d read the other week had managed in 2 and a half pages, most of which wasn’t dialogue. This may have influenced me somewhat, but still – one of the things I like about drama is what’s unsaid, as
well as physical interactions between the characters, and so much here got overwhelmed with words. Again, though, great performances despite this; particularly Sylvia, who gets a rather thankless role in both timelines (she has more of a character arc in the 1950s version, actually, being pretty much just the sassy friend in the 2000s), and the transitions between the times were very nicely done.
Noel Coward, reinvented slightly for modern day – I suspect the original did not contain a stage direction about snorting cocaine off an iPad (the cocaine, possibly, but not the technology) – and with characters ostensibly from New Zealand (two of them meet at a house party in Kumeu), although enjoying the international rootlessness of the very rich. Smart, witty and completely unsympathetic; well acted, well staged (with assorted pieces of consumerism), and fabulous outfits. The songs are also updated –Elyot and Amanda share Lou Reed’s Perfect Day, rather than Someday I’ll Find You, and I had the Scissor Sisters’ Let’s Have a Kiki stuck in my head for some days afterwards. What I’m not wild about is the physical violence; played for laughs, and mostly successful, but with Sybil and Victor there’s less history and more discrepancy of size, and it’s hard to see it as anything other than assault. Still. It’s not a play where you’re supposed to like anyone, after all.
The Pride
Most of the way through this play, there’s a scene in which Phillip – a married and closeted gay man in the 1950s – is being admitted for psychiatric treatment aimed at “curing” his homosexuality through aversion therapy. It’s a bitter, painful sequence, and while the doctor overseeing the treatment is concerned entirely with Phillip’s sexual behaviour, Phillip himself tries – and fails – to ask whether the treatment will correct his love for his male partner as well.
I really liked the scene. I would have liked the play much better if it started there, rather than nearly finishing; instead, it’s more linear, for all that it moves between two timelines. It does so with the same set of characters (Phillip, his wife Sylvia and lover Oliver in 1958; Phillip and Oliver, separated due to Oliver’s preference for anonymous sex but still involved, and their straight supportive friend Sylvia in 2008), and it’s very, very talky. The characters go on – and on – about their feelings, analysing and insisting and narrating, and although the performances are excellent, the narrative never really grabbed me. I did realise at one point that two of the characters had just taken about ten minutes to get across the emotional point that the slash fic I’d read the other week had managed in 2 and a half pages, most of which wasn’t dialogue. This may have influenced me somewhat, but still – one of the things I like about drama is what’s unsaid, as
well as physical interactions between the characters, and so much here got overwhelmed with words. Again, though, great performances despite this; particularly Sylvia, who gets a rather thankless role in both timelines (she has more of a character arc in the 1950s version, actually, being pretty much just the sassy friend in the 2000s), and the transitions between the times were very nicely done.
