Private Lives

The Play

Noël Coward's Private Lives is undoubtedly one of the best known theatrical comedies in the English language. In very much the same way as Shakespeare, Coward can be seen to epitomise English theatre. However, unlike Shakespeare's plays, Noël Coward's drama seems apparently resistant to change.

Coward wrote Private Lives for himself and Gertrude Lawrence, revue star and long-time friend. The mark of Coward and Lawrence is still indelibly imprinted on the two central characters Elyot and Amanda - the marital couple doomed unable to live either with or without each other. In some ways, Private Lives as a play suffers from its original casting and success. Elyot and Amanda can never be conceived to be performed in any other way, and therefore any other actor tackling the role is destined to be either a fair or abominable approximation of Coward or Lawrence. Unlike Shakespeare, where directors, actors and audiences are generally seen to be allowed more licence in interpretation and staging, Private Lives remains constant, reliable, unchanging and unchangeable.

Mass unemployment and economic stagnation is perhaps a fairer picture of 1930s Britain than is the world of Private Lives. Noël Coward himself was from a much more humble and mundane background than his stage persona Elyot Chase would suggest. He came from a lower middle-class family and in fact invented a persona for himself as a highly cultured member of the English upper-class social set. He is now remembered as the epitome of the well-bred, cultivated society wit, in spite of the fact that this was plainly a fabrication, an invention; literally a fantasy.

Perhaps this is what is appealing to us about Private Lives: it is constructed, artificial, an invention. Elyot and Amanda do not exist in our modern world; perhaps they never did. Private Lives indulges our desire for fantasy much in the same way as it did for Coward himself. We can take on these roles, either as actors or audience, revelling in social and theatrical "dressing up".

Private Lives examines the lives and loves of a particular class at a particular historical time. The class of people that Noël Coward was writing about (one that he himself was desperate to join) had, for some decades, been facing extinction. Their continued existence speaks volumes about the resilience of class. But then class has always had both factual and fictional components: the illusory or ideological nature of our lives may enslave us as much as any economic tyranny. The Private Lives that we present today is more about the illusions and delusions by which we are held captive, than about attempting to reconstruct the peculiarities of Coward's England in the 1920s and 30s.

CREDITS

"Astonishing, audacious theatre" Thelma Good