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Kevin Lawrence's Reviews > Design for Living
Design for Living (Modern Plays)
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Noël Coward’s play Design for Living is a very dated play ostensibly about a love triangle (hinting at bisexuality), but it's really an exploration of being downright shameless. At one point, the female lead in this love triangle asks one of her male counterparts, “haven’t you got any shame at all?” To which he replies, “just about as much as you have.” To wit: none.
The actual dynamic of this ménage à trois is very repetitious: two partner up and live together quietly pining for the third while that third member goes out in the world and makes his/her fortune, only to return and change places with one of the two who then takes his/her turn to live together with one of the three until all three have had a go in this dynamic and will be reunited as a group in the final act. And a lot of words and mildly repressed histrionics accompanies this repetitious arrangement, until the final act.
So the final act is where the heart of the play resides -- but what an unaccountably mean-spirited dénouement (albeit, it's the wittiest part of the play)! A fourth character who has conventionally married the female lead is made to be an unwitting comic cuckold once they go whole-hog and decide to live as a triangle; that strawman character is actually named Ernest Friedman, perhaps the most portentous name one could think of once you know what Coward is up to.
I probably would have appreciated this play more if I had read it in my 20s than reading it now -- it’s a young person’s play, when the idea of flouting social conventions is seemingly a source of liberating exuberance. But age teaches us that doing so at anyone else’s expense actually has a very corrosive impact on the supposed unconventional actor. When Ernest says in disgust to the three of them, “I see a ruthless egotism, an utter disregard for anyone’s feelings but your own,” I think I’m meant to find his judgment distasteful but actually I find his response refreshingly honest and human. I would not want to live in any contact with these three people, at all, and I gladly set the play aside once finished with a slight sense of shame for thinking I might have been attracted to these type of people at any point in my life.
The actual dynamic of this ménage à trois is very repetitious: two partner up and live together quietly pining for the third while that third member goes out in the world and makes his/her fortune, only to return and change places with one of the two who then takes his/her turn to live together with one of the three until all three have had a go in this dynamic and will be reunited as a group in the final act. And a lot of words and mildly repressed histrionics accompanies this repetitious arrangement, until the final act.
So the final act is where the heart of the play resides -- but what an unaccountably mean-spirited dénouement (albeit, it's the wittiest part of the play)! A fourth character who has conventionally married the female lead is made to be an unwitting comic cuckold once they go whole-hog and decide to live as a triangle; that strawman character is actually named Ernest Friedman, perhaps the most portentous name one could think of once you know what Coward is up to.
I probably would have appreciated this play more if I had read it in my 20s than reading it now -- it’s a young person’s play, when the idea of flouting social conventions is seemingly a source of liberating exuberance. But age teaches us that doing so at anyone else’s expense actually has a very corrosive impact on the supposed unconventional actor. When Ernest says in disgust to the three of them, “I see a ruthless egotism, an utter disregard for anyone’s feelings but your own,” I think I’m meant to find his judgment distasteful but actually I find his response refreshingly honest and human. I would not want to live in any contact with these three people, at all, and I gladly set the play aside once finished with a slight sense of shame for thinking I might have been attracted to these type of people at any point in my life.
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