Yesterday we enjoyed a production of Noel Coward's Private Lives at the Royal Exchange in Manchester. We love the Royal Exchange and it is so good that they have returned to staging "proper" theatre. They went through a few years of staging hardly anything worth watching; appealing instead to minority audiences only. I hope that the packed theatre will convince them that traditional, good plays are still worth staging.
This production of Private Lives, with Jill Halfpenny starring in the role of Amanda, was fabulous. Staged on a slowly rotating stage, the action takes place over a small number of days, with a small cast of four actors.
Private Lives is a comedy of manners, a drawing room comedy, but rather more vitriolic and risqué than one normally expects. When it first opened in 1930 the second act love scene was nearly censored as it was considered too indecorous! The fast-paced comedy is about a divorced couple (both honeymooning with their new spouse) who unexpectedly fall back in love with each other. But, behind closed doors, or in the private lives, the reasons they originally divorced soon become apparent again. As Coward famously says "I think very few people are completely normal really, deep down in their private lives".
The play is full of Coward's wit and humour, as well as the wonderful song Some Day I'll Find You. Victor and Sybil, the other halves of the Amanda and Elyot, are good foils capturing how their fretfulness and piety are just as insufferable as Elyot and Amanda’s reckless narcissism. They pontificate about morals and decency – until the tables are turned, descending into roaring tirades of their own. As the stage revolves, we see Coward’s point that it’s one big cycle from love to hate and back again, endlessly blowing hot and cold, all of them ultimately as bad as each other, no matter their public appearance.
With the stage split down the middle, the couples and characters become two halves of the same whole. And yet, in spite of everything, Amanda and Elyot get their happily ever after: smiles on their faces as they stride off into the horizon at the end, arm in arm. Seemingly made for each other after all.