by Julian Wood
Worth: $15.00
FilmInk rates movies out of $20 — the score indicates the amount we believe a ticket to the movie to be worth
Cast:
Rose Byrne, Kelli O’Hara, Tracee Chimo, Mark Consuelos, Christopher Fitzgerald, Aasif Mandvi
Intro:
… a rather jolly night at the theatre.
Every era has its conventions and understandings and that’s what gives artists and commentators something to satirize. Sir Noel Coward, that doyen of verbal wit and the stylish put down, got a lot of his effects by being icily polite and then inserting the stiletto. In this production of his 1925 play Fallen Angels there is full scope for this barbed gentility.
It is pretty simple in structure and, really, not very much of consequence happens. However, that is sort of the point. It is a parlour piece about silly, privileged people of the kind that Coward knew only too well. There is also great repartee interlaced with audience-pleasing farcical misunderstandings.
The ironically-named fallen angels are two society women, Julie (Kelli O’Hara) and Jane (Rose Byrne switching back to comedy after the excoriating If I Had Legs I Would Kick You). They get together when their slightly stodgy husbands have gone off to play golf, eagerly awaiting the arrival of Maurice (Mark Consuelos), the dashing Frenchman they knew in their youth. What titillates them, and makes them anxious, is that they both had a fling with Maurice before they were married. There is only one thing that will steady the nerves and that is copious amounts of champagne. What could possibly go wrong?
This production from the Todd Haimes Theatre in New York is filmed in the neutral static-camera style of the NT Live series. The action all takes place in a one-room set, so it had better provide enough period detail to please the eye. The large, elegant living room as done here is very pleasing with wonderful art deco touches from the 1920s. The costume designers contribute well too by providing both Jane and Julie with delicious silk evening gowns. The pacing is sharp, and the lines are delivered crisply as they have to be in a Coward play. Good support playing also contributes. This includes an occasionally scene-stealing turn from Tracee Chimo as the nosey, and much too clever housemaid, Saunders.
A lot of the play hinges on the women getting tipsy and letting slip some in vino veritas truths. As it goes on, it also needs them to get blind drunk, offering opportunities for physical humour. The audience in this recording clearly lap that up. Actually, playing drunk convincingly is harder than it sounds. O’Hara is a little more in tune with the material somehow, and she manages the code switches better of the two. Byrne sometimes tips over into hamming it up a bit. In fact, her performance as a whole could perhaps have been dialed down. Still, their ensemble playing and rapid exchanges are often fun. Further, the observations about marriage and the seven-year itch haven’t dated as much as one might expect. Given that the play is just over a hundred years old (itself a sobering thought) it still provides a rather jolly night at the theatre.
