King Midas Calls the Tune

By T.E. Kalem

PRIVATE LIVES by Noel Coward

Noel Coward once went backstage and tartly informed the two leading players in one of his shows that their performance was "a triumph of nevermind over doesn't-matter." If Coward were around to chide Elizabeth Taylor and Richard Burton for a similar self-indulgence, he would have to trip them up on the way to the bank. Both are said to receive $70,000 per week. Coward may have written Private Lives but Midas cast this revival.

Presumably, the public has made it a box-office sellout in the titillating hope that it is a keyhole drama. Sad to say, Liz and Dick are almost as inept at playing themselves as they are at re-creating Coward's characters. All passion spent, they seem blankly disaffected, otherwise engaged. The chemistry between them is about as combustible as lukewarm tea, though their quarrels raise ghostly, vulgarized echoes of Who's Afraid of Virginia Woolf?

The plot line is as simple as sin. Previously wed to each other, Amanda (Taylor) and Elyot (Burton) meet again on the terrace of a seaside resort in France. Each is on a second honeymoon with a fail-safe second mate. Amanda has chosen conventional, humdrum Victor (John Cullum), and Elyot has chosen humdrum, conventional Sibyl (Kathryn Walker). But Amanda and Elyot are blithe spirits: witty, sophisticated, selfish, mercurial. They skip off to Paris, make love again, tiff tempestuously again and, when discovered by the appalled Victor and Sibyl, steal off together again.

The basic flaw with Taylor and Burton is that they lack any flak for feather-light comedy. They substitute double or sextuple entendre, as when Taylor says, "I feel rather scared of marriage really," looking out at the audience with the eyes of a wounded doe. What the Elyot-Amanda roles call for is the sort of fond nonchalance and glancing asperity that William Powell and Myrna Loy brought to Nick and Nora Charles in The Thin Man series. What Taylor's role model was for her part is undecipherable; it comes out as some sort of compromise between Mata Hari and Lady Macbeth. Inflection, which is paramount with a Coward line, is either beneath or beyond her. On a line like "Extraordinary how potent cheap music is," she puts equal stress on "potent" and "cheap" so that the fun is missing and the meaning is blurred. What she has doffed in avoirdupois she has put on in ancien Louis B. Mayer regime costumery, particularly one black-and-white Theoni V. Aldredge outfit that makes her look like a Hollywood penguin.

Burton's melancholy mien and burnt-out stance would scare any comic muse off into the wings. His has too long been the gravity of a potentially heroic tragic actor waylaid en route to his destiny. His voice is still a casque of gold, but like that ardent Burton fan, Churchill, he seems always to be addressing a constituency, never a person. Of course, the audience for this Taylor-Burton fandango is undeniably a constituency.

--By T.EKalem This file is automatically generated by a robot program, so viewer discretion is required.