Design For Living

A Review

“Look it’s perfectly simple, or at least it should be. I love you. You love me. You love Otto. I love Otto. Otto loves you. Otto loves me.”

Andrew Scott, Lisa Dillon and Tom Burke as intertwined lovers Leo, Gilda and Otto

Noel Coward’s Design For Living concerns itself solely with words and their ability to seduce. Stripped back to just the words, the play would lose nothing, for the setting, characters, story itself, are merely vessels for the utterances that they contain. The play is an expression of Coward’s love for himself, and all those that can summon words at will and who are thereby part of his world. Director Anthony Page, in his current production at Coward’s own Old Vic Theatre, not only comprehends the significance of words in this whimsical work, but is skillfully meek in his ability to allow the dialogue to take centre stage.

The drama is set in the 1930s and follows the struggles of three lovers trapped in an emotional menage a trois as they come to grips with their situation. She is an interior decorator. He is a playwright. And he is an artist. All of them are in love. Really. While this immediately marks them as societal outsiders, the more important distinction that raises them above the other characters (and their banal morality) is a shared mastery of language. Wielding the power of words, or “talking nonsense” as it is described to the characters of Coward’s world that lack this power, places the lovers above all others and, like Greek gods, they are beholden only to those of their own elevated rank. Indeed, those denied words are denied life itself. As the title suggests, in a world where the only currency is words, those without them lack the ‘design for living’.

The play purposefully employs an awkward, obvious structure, with little real dramatic ‘action’. Each of the three acts are placed in a different city - Paris, London and New York, respectively- and in each act, one lover goes through two tests. The first is to deal with the tormenting ascent into professional success, and the second is to be torn asunder from the other two lovers, which is to say words, which is to say life. Each is then drawn back into the fold and the emotional and sexual triangle that is so repulsive to outsiders, but so inexorable to insiders. The dramatic progression is painfully laborious, (which will doubtless repulse audience members outside of the joke as it does characters who are), but the three leads are to be applauded for injecting something approximating emotional journeys into a play that is not concerned with the traditional dramatic idea at all. Our interest, of course, is not with their journeys, but rather with the sweet nothings that a smiling Coward is whispering in our ears.

Similarly, the supporting cast is impressive in their ability to draw life into badly drawn sketches of characters. While one could criticise the obviousness of the servants’ disdain, which is, at best, vaudevillian, given the two levels of character that exist, this seeming theatrical mistake is again exactly correct. Their thoughts should be obvious, their movements clumsy and their jokes clown-like. They cannot be part of the joke, and the self-awareness along with it, that the wordsmiths and audience share.

Fittingly again, Lez Brotherston’s set is necessarily simple, elegant and awkward. There is one room in each act in which the action takes place and while the three visages are opulent to be sure, the purpose of the play is not forgotten. Each room is spiritually hollow. Be it a shambling artist’s studio in London, a townhouse in Paris or a lavishly moneyed New York penthouse, the setting is lifeless. It is as if the physicality of the space is almost embarrassing when compared to the richness of the parallel world that inhabits it, in the conversation between lovers.

Strangely, the tawdry affairs comically depicted here capture more exactly my own experience of seduction than any stock standard love story ever could. The feeling, for me at least (I will divulge), is something like the tense moment of realising a heist. My elation is heightened, or rather dwarfed, by the feeling that I have stolen something, or achieved something that was never mine to achieve. It is the fascination of one’s own power and the shocking thrill of catching one’s self wielding it.

Coward shares this thrill, and is aware of it. Like Shakespeare before him, he has fallen prey to the fantasy of seducing someone utterly with words. As Shakespeare’s Puck simpers in the final lines of a play on the subject of the same fantasy, ‘think you have but slumbered here’. One can reach out and grab hold of the rich, fatty smugness in the words, in which the Shake crows unashamedly at his seduction; a lover that is all-powerful, completely irresistible, and who knows it. Coward inherits from his eloquent predecessor not only the love of words and a fascination with the heady power that accompanies them, but also the cock-suredness and lazy indulgence of a lover under his own spell. We are a plaything in his fingers and can only hope that he will give in to us as we gave in long ago.

Design For Living is a masterful production of a work by a powerful wordsman that leaves one raggedly wishing for more.


Design For Living is showing at the Old Vic Theatre until November 27. It runs for three hours with two twenty minute intervals.

Michael Peters
London, October 2010