Noël Coward created Private Lives for himself and Gertrude Lawrence in 1930. It is, along with Hay Fever, his most popular play and the most often performed.
Elyot and Amanda meet five years after their divorce whilst they are on their respective honeymoons with their new partners in a French seaside hotel. They take flight for Paris.
Amanda and Elyot are two glib, irritating, promiscuous egoists, who can’t bear to be apart and yet quarrel all the time when they are together. The biggest audience reaction on the press night was a gasp of comic outrage when Elyot says it is OK for men to be promiscuous but not for women to be promiscuous as well.
The second act, in its glib repartee, jealous recriminations, egotistical bickering, boorish behaviour and idiotic fighting, is a microcosm of their former bitter-sweet marriage. Coward acknowledged that the second act, was trickier and had more pitfalls than anything he had ever attempted as an actor.
Coward and Lawrence were in their thirties when they played Elyot and Amanda. Nigel Havers and Patricia Hodge are in their seventies. Are they too old? Of course, they are too old. They should have played the roles when they were much younger. Does it matter? Of course, it matters.
And yet it doesn’t matter. The play is funny. The dialogue is witty. Havers and Hodge have the necessary high comedy expertise. Their performances are very enjoyable in their own right.
Their very presence gives the comedy an additional acidity. Ravaged by time and deeply pessimistic, Elyot and Amanda are now even more aware that their “ludicrous, overbearing love” cannot last and that old age and death are around the corner. A line like, “Come and kiss me, darling, before your body rots,” has all the greater impact for being so unexpected. Private Lives is not as flimsy a trifle as was originally thought back in 1930.
Coward’s song, “Some Day I’ll Find You”, strikes exactly the right haunting note, too. How potent cheap music is!
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