In 1932, the year before Noël Coward's Design for Living--his then scandalous tale of an insouciant ménage à trois--was first mounted in New York, Coward wrote the song Let's Live Dangerously, which captured in two lines the spirit that took him two windy acts to incarnate: "Let's live boisterously, boisterously, roisterously / Let's lead moralists the devil of a dance." The song is more or less a mission statement of Coward's comedy: to drive the bourgeoisie crazy with the imperialism of his talent. At thirty-two, Coward was already, in his own words, "the belle of the ball." He had shed his lower-middle-class origins for a de-luxe persona, and in all his public guises--songwriter, performer, playwright, personality--fostered the myth of a British talentocracy in which he was queen of the worker bees. By 1932, when the average British wage was about a hundred pounds a year, Coward had an annual income of fifty thousand pounds; he was the richest writer in England, with George Bernard Shaw and A. A. Milne trailing second and third. Coward was feeling invincible, and Design for Living, which the Roundabout is reviving at the American Airlines Theatre, is a gigantic raspberry blown from the empyrean of his fame at the plebes and the Pecksniffs of the world.
Originally written as a vehicle for Coward and the Lunts--one of Broadway's most famous acting couples--the comedy brazenly asserts the century's new gospel of celebrity. "Let's be photographed and interviewed and pointed at in restaurants! Let's play the game for all it's worth!" the successful playwright Leo (Dominic West) crows to his bosom buddy, the successful painter Otto (Alan Cumming), after both are jilted by their muse and inamorata, Gilda (Jennifer Ehle), on the second of three laps of Coward's sexual merry-go-round. Coward's own spectacular sense of separation from society--"I am related to no one except myself"--is consolidated in the unrepentant trio, who wear their bohemianism like a badge of honor. In their self-indulgent bubble, they take individualism to its extreme. "Look at the whole thing as a sideshow," Gilda tries to explain to their mutual friend, the well-named Ernest--whom she later briefly marries. "People pay to see freaks. Walk up! Walk up and see the Fat Lady and the Monkey Man and the Living Skeleton and the Three Famous Hermaphrodites!" But the freakishness that Coward is actually justifying (and disguising) is not so much his selfishness as his homosexuality. "From now on we shall have to live and die our own way," Gilda tells "little Ernest," leaving him in the lurch after their two-year marriage and returning to her beloved ménage. "No one else's way is any good, we don't fit."
In Coward's comedies of bad manners, frivolity jams the frequency of moral outrage. At the finale, Ernest (John Cunningham, in superb high dudgeon) calls them "worthless degenerates" without "a decent instinct among the lot of you." He exits spitting spiders. "Why should you have the monopoly of noise?" Leo crows back. "Why should your pompous moral pretensions be allowed to hurtle across this city without any competition? We've all got lungs; let's use them! Let's shriek like mad! Let's enjoy ourselves!" With normality now banished, the three collapse on a sofa in self-congratulatory hilarity. The stage direction reads, "They groan and weep with laughter; their laughter is still echoing from the walls as--the curtain falls." It is the sound of frivolity's vindictive triumph--all the more provocative for being voiced in the depths of the Depression.
To be great, comedy must be cruel, and that is why it is usually written by the young; the ruthless heart has yet to be humbled by loss or by a sense of an ending. In the line of wit to which Coward's comedies belong, for instance, Sheridan (The School for Scandal) was twenty-six; Congreve (The Way of the World) was thirty; Orton (What the Butler Saw) was thirty-four; and Wilde (The Importance of Being Earnest) was a positively decrepit forty-one. Design for Living, however, is more a lecture masquerading as theatre; it's too schematic and too self-important for the cruelty to play out in surprising ways.
Here, although the director Joe Mantello has encouraged the scenic designer Robert Brill to go gargantuan with the sets, as a kind of metaphor for the characters' grandiosity, it's a choice that unwittingly emphasizes the gimcrack quality of the play's structure. Otherwise, the production is superbly cast and well focussed. Jennifer Ehle--the next new big thing, in my view--doesn't shrink from Gilda's cruelty but creates a fretful, manic, vivid inner world for her character. As she leaves her men, singly and in groups, her restless dissatisfaction forces hurt into their slaphappy partnership, and frees the play from the aspic of British high-comedy mannerisms in which it is usually preserved. As Leo, Dominic West, with his matinée-idol profile, plays well opposite Alan Cumming, who persuasively turns Otto into a kind of wide-eyed bohemian pixie. (His only gauche note is a pierced eyebrow, which manages to skew an entire set and all its period décor.)
At one point in the play, when Leo and Gilda are living together, Leo says, "Doesn't the Eye of Heaven mean anything to you?" Gilda replies,"Only when it winks." Unfortunately, in Design for Living Coward is finger-wagging, not winking. His genius was for style. He was not a thinker. (At the mere suggestion, Sean O'Casey exclaimed, "Mother o' God!") Of all Coward's comedies, this is his least effective; its alchemical balance--that combustible mixture of aggression and pleasure--is off. That said, as an early witness to the spiritual attrition of fame, the play has a pleasurable monstrousness, and this production makes the most of it. As a Harburg-Arlen parody of the play observed, a couple of years later, "We're living in the smart upper sets. / Let other lovers sing their duets. / Duets are made for the bourgeoisie-oh / But only God can make a trio."