Charles Edwards – Theatre – 2005 - Private Lives/Much Ado About Nothing

[updated 18 March 2011]

Private Lives by Noel Coward
Theatre Royal, Wednesday 22 June - Saturday 6 August 2005
In repertory with Much Ado About Nothing (Wednesday 29 June - Saturday 6 August 2005)

Independent
'Best of all is Charles Edwards, who is deliciously funny as stuffy Victor, sipping cocktails as though they were poison and launching into flurries of facial tics and spasms as the full liabilities of misguided matrimony dawn upon him.'

[another review] 'Amanda's new hubbie Victor is expertly played by Charles Edwards who does a lovely line in discreet facial twitches.'

Telegraph
'For Amanda and Elyot, their shared wit and delight in outrage is an erotically stimulating private joke, a kind of humorous foreplay that also serves as a celebration of their independence from stuffy conventionality, so painfully represented by their new partners, Victor and Sybil (excellently played by Charles Edwards and Olivia Darnley).'

BBC
' Victor (Charles Edwards) and Sibyl (Olivia Darnley), traditionally cardboard cutout characters designed to help carry the leads, were full of passion and bravado. Character development clearly focused on enhancing the presence of the two unfortunate spouses of Elyot and Amanda... Olivia Darnley and Charles Edwards are left with little more than cardboard cutout characters to play with, yet they manage splendidly, she with super-clipped vowels, and he with bluster.'

Guardian
'Charles Edwards, pompously querulous, and Olivia Darnley are very good as the rejected spouses'

Morning Star Online
'her [Amanda] new spouse, played by Charles Edwards as an amusingly prim and proper period caricature.'

Swindon Advertiser
'Olivia Darnley is wonderful as Sybil, Elyot's jilted wife, and Charles Edwards postures and blusters with aplomb as Amanda's abandoned husband Victor.'

Financial Times
'As for the young supporting roles of Sibyl and Victor, Darnley and Edwards give the staging's best performances: their every reaction and new impulse shifts the essence of the play.'


Much Ado About Nothing

Times
'Charles Edwards finds what’s lonely and troubled in the play’s one true bachelor, Pedro himself. What an interesting actor Hall’s season is proving this Edwards to be. Let’s see more of him.'

[from another review] 'There are strong performances from Edwards as the ineffectual Don Pedro and Philip Voss as Hero’s raging father, Leonato.'

B A magazine
'Both my companion and myself agreed that Gillett's performance really steals the show, but is closely followed by Charles Edwards' interpretation of the Prince, Don Pedro, as a witty and compassionate aristocrat. Combined, these strong performances create an amusing and plausible set of characters.'

Independent
'Edwards is excellent, too, as Don Pedro, the Prince who arrives in Messina at the head of his demobbed regiment, in Hall's graceful Regency-period production of Much Ado.'

Financial Times
'the revelatory variety of colours brought by Charles Edwards to the role of Don Pedro'

Variety
'Charles Edwards sharpens one's sense of the nobleman Don Pedro as a Malvolio-like malcontent who resolutely refuses to join in the couplings with which the play concludes.'