Private Lives by Noel Coward

Private Lives
By Noel Coward
Royal Exchange Theatre, 28 February 2011

Photo by Jonathan Keenan

The triumph of this play, undoubtedly Coward’s best, derives from the way in which the characters are both above and in the fray of life.

Elyot and Amanda (played admirably by Simon Robson and Imogen Stubbs) are sophisticated, chic, glamorous and oh so modern; yet they are also bruised by past experience, still very much in love, bewildered by emotion and have a vulnerability that they cannot shed.

With Coward’s writing, similarly, there is wit and superiority (even if its sometimes pasted on or is tongue-in-cheek) yet also genuine emotion.  He knows women, particularly a certain highly strung,  capricious, ever so slightly unreasonable sort of woman and he loves them, beauty spots and all.  Their flaws are adornments.

This Royal Exchange production does the play full justice.  It is an enjoyable and an immensely entertaining ride, as always, especially Acts 2 and 3.

Private Lives is running at The Royal Exchange Theatre until 9 April.  Details here.

Love Speaks Its Name

Love Speaks Its Name
Gay and Lesbian Love Poems
Edited by J. D. McClatchy
Everyman’s Library, May 2001
ISBN: 9781841597454

Just under 150 poems are contained in this compact volume, arranged in various sections which follow the process of falling in and out of love.

So we have sections entitled Longing, Looking, Loving, Ecstasy, Anxiety and Aftermath.  In life, the last two are optional and not really to be recommended, but if  poets skipped them, our literature would be much the poorer.  ‘Domestic as a plate’ (a simile taken from Millay’s poem ‘Grown-up’) does not really cut it.

Among the poets represented here are the famous and the indisputably great – Sappho, Shakespeare, Whitman, Lorca, Auden, Elisabeth Bishop – yet there are poets to be discovered in these pages too.  One such is Naomi Replansky, whose poem ‘The Oasis’ traces a renewal or a reawakening of love.  Here’s the last verse:

I thought the desert ended, and I felt
The fountains leap.
Then gratitude could answer gratitude
Till sleep entwined with sleep.
Despair once cried: No passion’s left inside!
It lied. It lied.

It was good to encounter Housman’s verse once more.  On one level he is an unpretentious and uncomplicated poet and there is nothing fancy about his verse forms at all.  But the direct way in which he communicates emotion is extraordinary: heart to heart.

There are a number of Cavafy’s sensual and elegiac poems: all about beautiful sexy young men who will yet grow old and die.  A single theme, virtually, but he riffs on it superbly.  ‘The Bandaged Shoulder’ is an astounding poem, especially when read in the light of the tragedies wrought by AIDS.  That last line – ‘the blood of love against my lips’ – induces a very definite frisson.

Every poem of Frank O’Hara’s is wonderful and there are four here.  Once heard, his voice is irresistible

I approve of the editor’s decision to include a quartet of song lyrics – such as Noel Coward’s ‘Mad About the Boy’ – along with the regular poems.

This is a fine anthology, although there are some notable absentees: John Ashbery, Genet and Genet’s translator Jeremy Reed being three.