Kenneth Hurren on Coward's equilateral triangle
Michael Blakemore, an astute and perceptive director in most of his work, seems to have found himself baffled by Design for Living, Noel Coward's 1933 comedy presently revived at the Phoenix. This is no great criticism, for Coward's treatment of human sexual relationships was always apt to seem strangely perverse, at best rather facetiously disembodied, and the resultant difficulties are clearly enormous in apiece that is ostensibly about little else.
The trick is to accept that the three principal characters are simply the cardboard cut-outs of artificial comedy, mere sounding boards for badinage that is often wittily turned but bears as little resemblance to real conversation as the cut-outs themselves do to recognisable human beings. This is not to say that the lines do not, here and there, hint observantly at some sort of romantic passion, as this — from two characters not far from falling into each other's arms: "What small, perverse notion in you forbids you to walk round the sofa to me?" ."I couldn't move if the house were :Icin fire."
"1 think it is."
I jotted down this exchange, perhaps imperfectly, in the margin of my programme because I suspect It was the consideration of such pregnant moments that prompted Blakemore — who is not a director prone to waste his time on empty frivolities — to seek genuine emotional truth and depth of characterisation among• Coward's glib creations. It is understandable but a mistake, and proved a thankless task for the director and his actors. The play is not about emotional truth or real people (that I cannot now remember who were the speakers of the fragment of dialogue I jotted down is not wholly attributable to an indifferent memory) and any insistence that it is will inevitably induce a mood antipathetic to the author's whimsical purpose.
Just to run over the plot for the benefit of latecomers (the essential details are meagre and will not take long), the situation in the comedy is triangular and involves a young woman named Gilda, who disports herself in the international arty set and is represented as being more or less irresistible to men at anything less than ten paces; a fashionable painter named Otto; and a successful playwright named Leo. The triangle departs somewhat from the conventional (in the less wayward 'thirties, I daresay the departure was more striking than it is today) in that it is not isosceles but equilateral. That is to say, it develops that each of the three loves both of the others. Indeed, after three acts spent globe-trotting, living with each other, walking out on each other, walking in on each other, running away from each other and coming to rest, successively, in Paris, London and New York, they agree that they cannot live without each other. Convulsed by their daring, they are apparently agreed at curtainfall to settle down together, casually shrugging off an art-dealer named Ernest whom Gilda, in a fit of exasperation at the untidiness of her relationship with the other two, has casually married.
Coward unquestionably intended all this to be regarded, as he wrote it, very larkishly indeed. The ending just happened to be a shapely and diverting solution for three puppets whom he created not to explore the permutations of sexual attraction and emotion in any serious sense, but quite deli-, berately to give himself and hisl friends the Lunts three audaciously flamboyant parts in which to amuse themselves. I doubt whether he ever had much grasp of the facts of emotional life between people of different sexes (when heterosexual passion threatened to come off the bridle, Coward preferred it to be frustrated, as in Brief Encounter, and even at a more superficial level he dealt with the subject most successfully in Blithe Spirit in which the lady, mercifully, is literally disembodied); and though he might have spread himself rather more confidently on whatever It s that Otto and Leo have going for their', the censorious world in which he wrote obliged him to make all that less than explicit.
He was thus writing under dual difficulties, which was doubtless why he was disconcerted by the idea of anyone's imagining he was putting up the Gilda-Otto-Leo ' design for living' as a beneficial suggestion to society in general. I think he would have . been alarmed by the present production, which seems doggedly to urge that we consider and weigh the human values of the piece. Not unnaturally, they are found wanting, and rather disagreeably so.
The leading players, Vanessa Redgrave, John Stride and Jeremy Brett are always stylish — and Miss Redgrave I found con tinuously captivating — but to think of them as 'real people' is to watch the fun of the comedy evaporate (no 'happy ending' is possible, because their future to gether hardly bears, thinking about), and to take their attitudes, seriously is to see them not as engaging eccentrics but as ruth-,
less self-seekers asking .a special' indulgence for the 'artistic tern-,
perament.' The subordinate char acters — a libellously seedy representative of the Evening Stan dard, a comic ' char ' of standard. design, a group of jaw-dropping; cafe-society New Yorkers seem, in this conception, to have been invented solely and snobbily to emphasise the superiority, to say nothing of the insufferable arrogance, of the gifted three. As for , Ernest, he is discomfited as cruelly as was Malvolio, with the difference that he had done nothing to deserve it. It is all, ultimately, depressingly charmless.
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