Sister act | 13 March 2010

Private Lives
Vaudeville, until 1 May

Party
Arts, until 13 March

Most popular

Rod Liddle

Sack the judges

This isn’t right. This can’t be happening. She’s over 50. Quite a bit over. In fact, she’s 53 and she’s playing the 29-year-old heroine in one of the finest comedies in the repertoire. And she’s doing it in London. And she isn’t even English. What possessed Kim Cattrall to imagine she could play Amanda in Private Lives? The answer turns out to be, supreme self-possession. From her first entrance, her starry grace communicates itself to the entire auditorium. The age question resolves itself straight away. She appears half-naked in a bathrobe. Her soft bare arms are plump and tanned and show none of the sinewed graininess of the gym or the bench press. One can’t tell whether surgical grooms have attended to her pelt but she seems as sleek and spry as the twentysomething she’s playing. And she doesn’t just perform the role, she knows it. She and Amanda might have been sisters. The turbulent emotional mishmash is presented in ragged harmony. The bickering pettiness, the coltish instability, the unappeasable yearning for romance, all these are artfully displayed and unified with a colloquial naturalism. And the accent? She doesn’t quite capture every vowel but what’s a vowel when she captures the house?

Her Elyot, Matthew Macfadyen, suggests both tradition and dissent from tradition. His sense of period is exact and his heavyweight physique, his robust vitality, seem to wipe away the mascara and feyness of the Coward era. This isn’t a Bohemian drifter with a pair of silk pyjamas but a full-on depressive seeking consolation in luxurious hilarity and the odd philosophical sideswipe. Macfadyen’s comic sense is absolutely secure, his intense and fractured desire for Amanda carries with it the constant pulse of reality, and the ache of melancholy in his voice lifts the performance to exquisite heights.