“Private Lives”: love as a battlefield

According to theatre lore, Noël Coward wrote his 1930 comedy Private Lives in four days…while recovering from the flu…in Shanghai. Considering the result, one could wish that more playwrights could follow his example.

Private Lives is a bright, sometimes brittle comedy of high style and bad manners. Coward presents us with Elyot and Amanda, two people who cannot live without each other but unfortunately cannot live with each other either. Once married, Elyot and Amanda divorced after three years.

The play opens five years later. Elyot has remarried, to the much younger Sibyl, and they have arrived at their honeymoon suite on the French coast. Amanda has remarried, to the somewhat younger Victor, and they have arrived at their honeymoon suite…which shares a balcony with Elyot and Sybil’s suite.

When the exes learn they’re both there on their honeymoons, they try to convince their respective partners to leave immediately for Paris without explaining why. Sibyl and Victor refuse to leave, heading in a huff to dinner (separately). Elyot and Amanda, falling in love with one another again, decide to run off together to Amanda’s flat in Paris after leaving good-bye notes for their new spouses.

A few days later, Amanda and Elyot are blissfully living together. But the behavior that caused them to split up before rears its head, and soon they are battling as ferociously as ever. At the furious height of their battle, Victor and Sibyl burst in, having finally tracked them down.

Under the deft direction of Michael Stewart Allen, the cast nimbly performs Coward’s verbal gymnastics. They also are given two delicious, delightful, often hilarious pantomime scenes. The first takes place between acts 1 and 2 as Sibyl and Victor are reading their good-bye notes. As they read, the set is made to disappear, not merely in full view of the audience but, inventively, to Sibyl and Victor as well. They react in bewildered horror, providing a perfect visual metaphor for the breakdown of their new marriages. The other is during a spat in Amanda’s apartment where Elyot invokes their “safe word”, forcing them to stop speaking for two minutes. While their words have forced them apart, their enforced silence gives them time to cool down and remember just how much they care for each other — yet provokes a tension which becomes a sequence of cascading impatience as they count down the seconds until they can speak again.

Ashley Blanchet, making her Shakespeare Theatre debut, is a delicious Amanda, able to go from cool hauteur to fiery hatred and back again with rapid-fire ease. Britt Michael Gordon’s Elyot is her match, keeping up with her emotional changes with his own mood swings. Gordon and Blanchet also get to show off their musical talents performing the wistfully romantic “Someday I’ll Find You”, which Coward specifically wrote for Private Lives.

Fiona Robberson’s Sibyl tries to use faux insecurity, simpering, and tears as manipulative tools, while Clark Carmichael’s Victor uses bravado and bluster in his attempts to intimidate (but comes off evoking Notre Dame’s Fighting Irish mascot.) Nicole Lawrie as Louise earns laughs in the small comic part of a French maidservant who has no patience with the British upper middle class twits for whom she works. She also effortlessly shows off her ability to do a perfect pratfall.

Dick Block’s scenic design is clever, with the interior of Amanda’s Art Deco-inspired Paris apartment revealed when Act 1’s set is made to disappear. Hunter Kaczorowski has designed elegant 1930s-styled outfits (with a touch of frump for the maid). With all the rough-and-tumble action in the second and third acts, credit is due to Fight Director Rod Kinter for keeping his actors safe while making their battles seem frightfully real.

Private Lives has attracted many well-known actors over the years. Coward himself was the original Elyot, with Gertrude Lawrence as Amanda and a young Lawrence Olivier as Victor. Elyot and Amanda have been played by Olivier and his then-wife Vivien Leigh, and by Richard Burton and Elizabeth Taylor.

But no matter who’s in it, Private Lives is a classic, a humorous yet ultimately pessimistic view of marriage. Above all, it is an extremely funny and witty play. I strongly encourage you to sample the sparkling concoction that is Noël Coward’s Private Lives!

Private Lives is presented by the Shakespeare Theatre of New Jersey in the F.M. Kirby Theatre at Drew University in Madison through June 7, 2026. For more information, or to purchase tickets, go to shakespearenj.org.