Rhino Feet

By RICHARD CORLISS

DESIGN FOR LIVING by Noel Coward

Noel Coward made mock of many social dogmas, but he was a true believer in the imperium of style. Those who had the divine spark got to ride through life on a silk cushion, inventing their own rules and then ignoring them, cutting the boorish infidels down with gay, rapier wit. Thus it is with the merrily amoral menage in Design for Living, a triangle with some complex emotional geometry. Otto (Frank Langella) and Leo (Raul Julia) are friends; Gilda (Jill Clayburgh) and Otto become lovers; Gilda dumps Otto for Leo; Gilda leaves them both for a stuffy art dealer; Otto and Leo liberate Gilda from genteel sobriety. In Coward's world the cabal of camaraderie must ever win out over the exclusivity of passion, and style consists of tiptoeing away from the mess one has made of one's life.

This star-laden revival at the Circle in the Square Theater, the first Broadway mounting of Design for Living since its 1933 premiere, refuses to tiptoe. Instead it galumphs, on thundering rhino feet, at the pitch and tempo of farce. Frenzy worked fine for Director George C. Scott in his production of Coward's Present Laughter two years ago. Not so here, where the bonhomie is so forced that it comes across as bullying. Though Langella and Julia occasionally mine the text for subterranean veins of grace and melancholy, Clayburgh storms about with the booming baritone and great-lady gestures of a strung-out dowager. One yearns for the buoyant charm that Vanessa Redgrave brought to the role in a 1973 London revival. But charm, alas, cannot be learned, earned or rented for the night. It is a quality as easy to perceive, and as rare to achieve, as Style. --By Richard Corliss