After a Long Career, Director Richard Eyre's Private Lives Marks His First Brush With Noel Coward

By Harry Haun
17 Nov 2011

Richard Eyre
Richard Eyre
Photo by Joseph Marzullo/WENN

Richard Eyre, the director of Mary Poppins and a slew of serious dramas from the National Theatre, talks about the genesis of his new Broadway staging of Noel Coward's Private Lives.

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After five Olivier Awards, three Tony nominations and even knighthood, Sir Richard Eyre is still chalking up distinctions. His latest will occur Nov. 17 when, for the first time in his life, Eyre (pronounced "air" and, personally, much preferred over "Sir Richard") will officially have two shows running simultaneously on Broadway.

His revival of Noel Coward's Private Lives with Kim Cattrall and Paul Gross logs up its first official performance at the Music Box, while his directorial collaboration with Matthew Bourne — a truly Eyre-Bourne Mary Poppins, from Disney and Cameron Mackintosh — sails serenely into its sixth year at the New Amsterdam with Performance No. 2,083.

Both shows are in sharp contrast to the half-dozen heavy-duty dramas he previously helmed on Broadway — Racing Demon, Skylight, The Judas Kiss, Amy's View, The Crucible and Vincent in Brixton. At 68, the British director shows signs of becoming lighter than, dare I say it?, Eyre.

The Mary Poppins musical experience led last spring to the West End tuner Betty Blue Eyes, a reunion of Poppins players like producer Cameron Mackintosh and songwriters George Stiles & Anthony Drewe (the team that pumped up the Sherman Brothers' original film score). Betty Blue Eyes was based on "A Private Function," Alan Bennett's hilarious original screenplay about a food-rationing community in Northern England of 1947 that raises a pig to sacrifice for the wedding of Princess Elizabeth and Prince Philip.

"The show was enormously well-received by the press," Eyre recalled, "but, sadly, it didn't run more than six months, so I guess it probably won't come over to Broadway. It's a shame because it was a lovely show, very charming."

Which has now returned him to the verbal music of Noel Coward — "Extraordinary how potent cheap music is" /"Certain women should be struck regularly, like gongs"/"Don't quibble, Sybil," etc. Not counting the ten plays that came over from London's Royal National Theatre from 1988 to 1997 during his reign as artistic director of that theatre company, this is Eyre's eighth time to direct on Broadway.

"I've never done a Coward play," Eyre admitted. "I'd seen many productions of Private Lives, and I have always liked the play. I've always felt that the play is more than a comedy of manners, and it's more than people just politely arguing and just politely flirting. I've always thought there was visceral, sexual energy in the play. I think it's a play that really is about the nature of sexual attraction, and so it was very important for me to cast actors who were not only attractive physically but attractive mentally, meaning actors who've a great intelligence and wit about them."

 Continued...