Private Lives

Fresh from critical success in Chichester, Jonathan Kent’s eagerly awaited production will not disappoint Noël Coward admirers. Although this is one of his more lightweight, superficial comedies, the production is a stylish, heady mix of extroverted acting and expertly delivered one-liners and Kent’s fluid, snappy direction plays up the farce.

Toby Stephens’s Elyot Chase and Anna Chancellor’s Amanda Prynne are the ‘modern’, upper-class couple whose volatile private lives are displayed. Their clearly evident sexual and mental attraction does not prevent them from tearing into one another tooth and claw, divorcing after a short marriage. However, while on honeymoon in Deauville with their new spouses, Sibil Chase and Victor Prynne, Elyot and Amanda discover that they have uncannily chosen the same resort after meeting on adjoining balconies. They quickly realise they are still in love, indifferent to their new partners, and decide to run away together to Paris.

Designer Anthony Ward’s set epitomises the glittering, slightly seedy, roaring 1920s in Amanda’s flapper-style Parisian apartment. It is their ideal watering hole: not least because Paris was then markedly cheaper than London and ignored bad behaviour. This is not exactly Strindberg’s The Dance Of Death – these consciously superficial, narcissistic, pseudo-bohemians don’t have jobs – and despite a fondness for drinking and verbal repartee and pace, Amanda’s dance to Strindberg’s Rites Of Spring on the gramophone and cubist-adorned walls, they seem devoid of artistic interests: too thin and bored for nihilism or tragedy.

Stephens’s Elyot astutely combines laconic energy and Wildean bon mot, his campness a deliberately disconcerting affront to mainstream masculine values: ‘If your husband comes anywhere near me I’ll scream.’ Chancellor’s Amanda makes the ideal foil; a feisty, self-obsessed social rebel, capable of manipulation to order, but also able to give as good as she gets.

While a contemporary relationship guru might diagnose a co-dependent relationship – never able to live together and never apart – whose acid pain is etched in continual abuse and domestic violence that the audience is encouraged to laugh at; Coward is really having a sharp dig at the English ruling classes’ bland, passion-starved repression and cult of the stiff upper lip. Anna-Louise Plowman’s insipid, whining airhead Sibyl and Anthony Calf’s horridly hearty, colourless but decent chap Victor, are even shallower, more egotistic figures – and far less fun, to boot.

Until 21 September at the Gielgud Theatre, Shaftesbury Avenue, London W1: 0844-482 5130, www.privateliveswestend.com