Slow start, splendid finale (From Salisbury Journal)

Slow start, splendid finale

4:56pm Thursday 2nd February 2012 in Entertainments

NOEL Coward's once controversial Design for Living focuses on a distinctive love triangle involving three bright young things in the late 1920s – playwright Leo, artist Otto, and Gilda, the female interior designer who has inspired them both. Each loves and, at different times makes love to, each of the others. But what they'd like to be – an excitingly unconventional “modern” setup is not immune from some annoyingly “old fashioned” jealousy and resentment.

It needs each in turn to get away for a while, and to taste wealth, celebrity and conventional success, before the three are finally able to choose with confidence their own particular design for living.

This is precisely what they do, in an excellent third act set in New York, where the debate between orthodox and alternative lifestyles that has simmered throughout boils over in striking theatrical fashion. The final half-hour is funny, dramatic, explosive and, not least important, succinct.

But it takes what seems like a very long time to reach this point. Aided by Alex Eales' design, Caroline Leslie's production possesses appropriate elegance, and gains in assurance, after taking a while to find its rhythm. But, notwithstanding Rachel Atkins' delightful Act 2 cameo as the comedy housekeeper, the overlong first two acts potter in Paris and loiter in London, apparently driven by the play's central ideas, rather than by its characters and the drama of the situation they inhabit.

Marianne Oldham's strong performance traces Gilda's path from restless but brittle excitement, via doubt and determination, to a measure of genuine insight. Effectively contrasting contributions come from Gyuri Sarossy, as the strident, tantrum-prone Leo, and Kieran Hill as the more measured and knowing Otto. And the characters' verbal jousting provides some powerful moments. Their underlying vulnerability and uncertainty, however, is less convincingly conveyed than it might be. As a result, for too long they come over as more obviously mildly irritating than genuinely interesting. And it's not until that splendid finale that we're really persuaded to care about them.

– Mick Martin