Consider this plot: A newly remarried man about town books into a hotel room for his honeymoon only to discover that his ex-wife has booked the very next room for her own honeymoon. Will old sparks be reflamed? And what about their new partners? Hijinks and hilarity ensue.

Sure sounds like a plot from a cookie-cutter romantic comedy. Get Justin Timberlake and Mila Kunis to star. We’ll call it ‘The Honeymoon’. Print that money.

Theatre buffs like you know will know that this is in fact the plot of perennial favourite Private Lives by Noel Coward. Scandalous on its 1930 debut, director Shane Bosher, with a few cosmetic changes has thrust this comedy of bad manners into a raucous and sexy contemporary set version. [More] 

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Director Shane Bosher has created an emphatically contemporary interpretation of Private Lives, designed to introduce a new generation of theatre-goers to Noel Coward’s scintillating wit and exquisite sense of structure.

The updating may have diminished the musicality of Coward’s language but the local references raise plenty of laughs and an edgy post-modern pastiche is achieved by having delightfully old-fashioned words like “shilly-shallying” and “slatternly” floating about in a world filled with iPads and trance dancing. [More] 

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For a play about relationships, you buy a ticket, you take your seat, and you settle in for a couple of hours of relationship mayhem. But Silo’s season of the sparkling 1930’s Noel Coward comedy Private Lives, which opened last night at Auckland’s Q Theatre, is so much more than a play about relationships.

Paramount to this production is the ‘love-to-hate-you’ chemistry between sophisticate Elyot and his equally sassy ex-wife Amanda, who awkwardly find themselves back in love, five years after their divorce, whilst honeymooning with their respective new spouses. Before the pair have even shared the stage in Shane Bosher’s modern interpretation, Matt Whelan and Mia Blake have cast their line to reel us in, one farcical mishap at a time.

A big pull to this show is the unfaltering Whelan, whose last stage credit was in Silo’s 2009 production of Holding the Man. He embodies the young, professional chic of superficial Elyot with a redemptive bumbling quality which makes him a pleasure to watch on the stage. Extra impressively there is no trace of Brad, Whelan’s long-term, long-suffering role on TVNZ’s Go Girls, as Elyot clings to triviality in the face of personal accountability and problematic drama. His Elyot combines style with an unmatched layer of merrily unsophisticated physical comedy.

Blake’s Amanda shares a similar superficiality; her poise and elegance almost the epitome of rich-bitch boredom and petulance, with surprising glimmers of humanity in which we watch a girl tragically make the mistake of falling in love with a boy, despite every reason she has not to. It’s a chemical explosion which Blake suckers us into over and over again. She proudly wears her evening gown, and silk bathrobes with authority, and even in the heights of chaos she dominates the situation. 

Main instigators of said situations are Sybil (Sophie Henderson) and Victor (Sam Snedden), Elyot and Amanda’s clearly mismatched new spouses. We meet them each on the adjoining balconies of their respective honeymoon suites, in love, with no idea that they’re about to embark on possibly the worst weekend of their lives. Obviously more-suited for each other, Henderson’s Sybil is played with a delightful naivety, and chirpiness, and Snedden’s Victor a crusty bore, though they expertly fall short of ever being dull.

If the play’s banter/bicker bit becomes slightly repetitive, we could perhaps blame a modern background for the historic farce. Despite local references, a hysterical rendition of Lou Reed’s ‘Perfect Day’ and a lot of “shilly-shallying about”, there is something about the pithy dialogue that seems to not quite mesh with its contemporary setting.

That the pace slows right down somewhere in the middle of the second act may have less to do with Shane Bosher’s direction than Rachael Walker’s set design. Aesthetically pleasing in every way, particularly for the modern portrayal, there is a disconnect between locations, as very minimal set changes make their settings unclear. 

However, the inhabitants are still an excellent match, which is the important part. Private Lives doesn’t offer soul-searching, fate-questioning, or deep-hearted discussion on who’s meant to be with whom at any given time, but there is never any question that Whelan and Blake are perfectly coupled.

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