Although Noël Coward’s witty play Private Lives is an intimate tale told with only five characters, the set design for the latest Broadway production (which just closed), imported from London’s West End through a run in Toronto, offers impressive and visually striking sets to accompany the bedroom farce. But it makes sense to have grand sets for emotionally explosive comedy, which finds a divorced couple (Kim Cattrall and Paul Gross) accidentally staying adjacent to one another while honeymooning with their new spouses on the French Riviera. Naturally, all sorts of nostalgic sexual shenanigans ensue. Originally written in 1930, the play resonates with modern audiences in its mischievous tone and sly views on marriage and divorce.
Exterior to Interior
Early on, Coward’s comedy offers the revelation that the exes still hold a flame for each other, and the initially distracting discomfort of their discovery on the hotel balcony of Act One turns into a mischievous romp in the Countess’ apartment during the second and third acts. Naturally, having a balcony set with a hotel façade on the apron masking the main stage leads to a surprise with the reveal of a deeper interior set in acts two and three. The catch? Dismantling that balcony quickly and efficiently to get the audience into the Countess’ apartment without a long wait during the unusually early intermission.
“It’s a tricky play, because no matter what the aesthetics are, or how any production chooses to stage it, you need a certain amount of technical space to do the first act, and it’s inevitable that on any stage that same space literally has to be the same space that you’re going to want for the apartment,” explains scenic designer Rob Howell, who worked on the show in London, Toronto and New York. “It’s where the play is going to work, so to deliver any sort of reasonable picture for the first act, you have to have some kind of clue as to how you’re going to get rid of it, because you need that space again for any sort of reasonable gesture in the second act and the third act.”
Howell recalls seeing a few productions of the show where the set change between Acts One and Two took too long, or the apartment set was too cumbersome to get into place quickly. “It’s a technical puzzle for any designer to try to get the balance of those two pictures right, knowing that you’ve only got the course of a normal interval to do it,” he says.
Having done a Swedish production of Private Lives prior to this latest incarnation, the scenic/costume designer was well aware of the challenges he faced. He even admits that halfway through its recent London run, the idea of building a hotel set with extra shutters rising to the ceiling to add extra “floors” struck him as a missed opportunity, which he has made up for in its North American shows.
The Balcony Railing
The balcony set for the first act is divided down the center by flower boxes that keep the two hotel suites apart. Patio furniture sits on either side, and a railing runs the length of the stage. That latter element is deceptively sturdy. While Cattrall’s character leans on it at stage left, it has more reinforcement over there, because when stagehands arrive to remove the railing during intermission, it comes apart fairly fast on the opposite side. This is important, as Howell has seen productions where the railing was “too substantial” and took a while to remove.
Another challenge with the railing was to keep enough spacing between the individual rods so that people in the first few rows could see through them. Given that the apron is curved, anyone close up has to look through the railing of whichever side is opposite them in order to see what is going on there. “It’s obvious, I suppose, but a technical thing is, the balcony is bound to be along the most downstage thing, whatever shape your floor plan is, and the people in the front row are bound to be looking through it,” notes Howell. “So you need to apply a kind of fragility to it so those people who are very close to it and below it don’t feel like they have got a brick wall in front of them. And, as you say, it has to be substantial enough for you to believe that the Countess can sit on it and would lean on it and do what you need a balcony to do.”
Angles and Curves
Once the audience gets into the apartment suite in the second and third acts, we go deeper into the stage. In contrast to the square, angular shapes that make up the hotel set, the apartment is full of circular or curved shapes: three sofas, the skylight, the aquarium, a gramophone, a piano and a masking scroll wall at upstage left, which masks the doorway through to the unseen kitchen. The room is large enough for the fights that ensue, yet small enough for the romantic intimacy that the story craves. The only striking rectangular shapes here are the front doors upstage center and the bedroom doors at stage left and right.
“The ceiling is flat, but it’s following the curved shape of the wall, which is made up of seven different ellipses,” reveals Howell. “Just one ellipsis wouldn’t have satisfied all the sightlines that you need to pull in the downstage left and right doors as far offstage as you can to get as many seats on the corresponding side of the auditorium to see those doors. It’s a puzzle in the New York theaters, because they are so much wider than our London theaters, so that leads you towards a much shallower space than one would want really because you want those doors to be as flat on to the audience as you can get, because you have wide, extreme sightlines coming through to them.”
In contrasting the visual feeling of the two sets, Howell set out to mirror the play’s trajectory. “In the first act, Coward is laying down the geometry for his idea, [that] there is a coincidence here, and it’s sort of a mathematical equation that’s there, so the straight lines and the accuracy of what he’s up to is useful to plant all of that. Then in Acts Two and Three, all of the lines are feminine, and you should feel like it’s a place that’s soft and [full of] love, and it’s got a very different mood to it. We’re done with the math. The geometry is in place and the groundwork has been laid in Act One, and now we’re into much more sensual and bigger themes. I suppose it has got much more of a feminine spirit to it.”
Having a circular, backless sofa center stage was important, particularly given the arguing, chasing and fighting that whirl about it. Howell says the show was written for a more traditional sofa with a back and arms, but he feels that a back on the sofa would create “a sort of subliminal wall for the audience between the sofa area and the back wall, and therefore the upstage center doors. As soon as you get rid of the back on the sofa, the room breathes. It would feel very, very different if that same sofa had back on it. The room would feel like a downstage space and an upstage space, and I feel that if Richard [Eyre] had directed or blocked anybody to go upstage of the sofa, they would’ve felt trapped up there. So a very simple thing like having a sofa with no back to it just lets the room breathe.”
Howell worked closely with lighting designer David Howe as he gave him quite a number of challenges to deal with. On top of an Act One set that was lit from the front without much benefit from the lighting grid, the apartment features a ceiling that blocks out most of the grid above.
Lighting for Depth
“There is an aperture that I put into the ceiling piece, which feeds the look of the scene,” says Howell, “but actually it’s there for him to be able to get some backlight through. He did a great job to light effectively just from the front and for it not to feel flat. It feels very deep because he did a careful job of lighting it. He didn’t have the position that a lighting designer would normally want to create depth, so it was a tough job for him. The ceiling piece is the bane of a lighting designer’s life. Sometimes a ceiling piece is useful to put a lid on the atmosphere of a scene, so in the end it was a net gain and he dealt with it brilliantly. It worked out.”
On top of dealing with the different aspects of the scenic and lighting design, Howell was also the costume designer for Private Lives. In the U.K. it is common for designers to simultaneously tackle those two jobs — Howell presumes it might have to do with a lower pay scale than designers get in America — but he finds the situation beneficial, particularly on a period piece like this.
“You submerge yourself in the period with reference books and any primary reference material that you can find,” he reports. “Those areas feed each other. I can tell when I’m at a show where two different people have done two different things. That’s not necessarily a bad thing, but I can tell. I can also tell when one person has done it, because you can see the line and texture have properly set each other. If two people are going to do it, they have to share everything, otherwise there is no good in me going off and doing my version of 1930s and you going off and doing yours and we keep our fingers crossed. It should feel like it’s all going through the same filter, and, ultimately, the best way to do that, I would argue, is to have the same person doing it.”
Contemporary Feel
Even though the play was penned in 1930, Howell feels that Private Lives is strikingly modern, particularly in terms of its themes and its portrayal of two people deeply, madly in love. While his scenic and costume work help to keep the period feel of the work, he does not feel that the show is completely planted in that time.
“You’ve got two principal actors who can balance that amazing thing of keeping the period alive but also being absolutely contemporary. I’m not really interested in a museum re-creation of a period. That’s not why I go to the theater, to discover that type of detail. It’s not that I’m not interested in it, but it’s not my primary reason [for doing that]. I’m more concerned with getting the mood right and the feeling that there is nothing there that is jarring with the period. Everything there is period-correct, but that’s not the point of it.”
Even though it offers some impressive visual elements, this production of Private Lives utilizes what it needs rather than tossing in a lot of extra razzle dazzle to distract the masses. “It’s actually a very, very simple set with no engineering and is nothing like some of the shows that are on Broadway with all singing, all dancing and automated sets,” observes Howell. “But it wouldn’t want that. A play like Private Lives doesn’t want to sit alongside giant mechanics and automation. It would sink the play and be the wrong choice.”
