THEATER REVIEW : Is Noel Coward Funny? Yes, and Meaningful, Too

For years, it seems, critics have had to apologize for liking Noel Coward. No one denies that he’s funny, of course. But does he have anything meaningful to say? Or is he forever to be consigned to the adjectives “amusing,” “tenuous” and “thin” that he culled when “Private Lives” opened in 1931?

What nonsense. “Private Lives,” now playing at the Hahn Cosmopolitan Theatre through Nov. 5, has plenty to say about the impossibilities of both living with and living without love and marriage in a world where everything, including the existence of heaven and hell, is subject to question. Should Coward be penalized for making us laugh in the process?

It is time to give tributes where tributes are due. To Coward, whose jokes still hold up after over half a century, and to the Gaslamp Quarter Theatre Company, which, under director Will Simpson’s loving and practiced hand, delivers its 14th Coward play with such contemporary flair that one might easily mistake the deceased playwright himself for being a resident artist there.

“Private Lives” sets up a crackerjack comedic opening in which a divorced couple, Amanda Prynne and Elyot Chase, unexpectedly find themselves in adjoining hotel rooms where they are honeymooning with new spouses.

One look at each other and they know they are still in love. Which aggravates them to no end because the passion that goes along with love seems inseparable from the passion that leads to breaking records over each other’s heads.

Also, they have remarried perfectly nice people who are perfectly determined to make them perfectly happy, but . . . but . . . but . . .

Part of what makes this suggestive stew so delightful is the complexity of the performances. Elyot’s and Amanda’s flippancy is nothing less than emotional armor, and the feelings do run deeply under the breastplates of their snappy comebacks.

Just when you think Rosina Widdowson-Reynolds plays every note on the emotional keyboard as Amanda, she makes up a riff that makes you sigh. And Mike Timoney squires his fire-plumaged dame with dead-pan panache as Elyot.

As the hapless second spouses, Paul Eggington and Liz Backenstow are appealing in their own rights. Maybe they are not what the doctor ordered for Amanda and Elyot--who may very well be of another species entirely--but when Eggington and Backenstow get their own dukes up, one spies glimmers of smoldering coals that may imply hope for them down the road as well.

Dianne Holly’s costumes complement the personalities perfectly. A sequined, seductively slinky gown for Widdowson-Reynolds that highlights her red hair to a T, serves as a comic contrast with Backenstow’s prim little-girl dress with the big pink bow in the back.

Robert Earl’s elegant sets and Matthew Cubitto’s lighting--more subtly effective on the terraced scene--add to the charm.

But the real key to Amanda’s and Elyot’s lasting appeal is that they are comic existentialists. Although they don’t believe in the hereafter, they do believe in love and each other. But they don’t believe that true love means fairy-tale, happily-ever-after endings any more than Stephen Sondheim does in his latest musical, “Into the Woods.”

They know life is messy and that elegant lovemaking will be interrupted by someone saying it’s too soon after dinner. And being hopelessly human, they will probably quarrel forever.

The chief lesson they do learn is that that might not be so bad.