When this play was first produced, the British theatrical impresario Ivor Brown wrote, “Within a few years, the student of the drama will be sitting in complete bewilderment before the text of Private Lives, wondering what on earth those fellows in 1930 saw in so flimsy a trifle.”  Despite summary dismissal by its original critics as a piece of fluff, Private Lives has never been out of production since Noël Coward wrote it more than seventy years ago.

We should all be lucky enough to find the love and the passion that Amanda and Elyot recover in one another.  We should all be down on our knees, fasting, to avoid the arguments and the violence which crackle through their relationship like static through a radio tube.  Private Lives is to do with love, with sex, with silence and argument as aphrodisiacs and intimate communications, with being able unexpectedly to recover that which one perceived to be irretrievably lost.  The play makes love with words, the violent ones as well as the overtly romantic.  It also damns social conventions completely, flirting continuously with the drawn-in-the-drifting-sand boundary between personal restraint and interpersonal chaos.

Critic Sean O’Connor describes Private Lives as a “superb black comedy of sexual manners masquerading as a light comedy.”  Amanda and Elyot share a sense of play; a rich, vulnerable, demanding love for one another; and also a primal anxiety about the wave of modernity upon which they luxuriously ride.  They perceive themselves to be the cutting edge; it is this very edge on which they cut both themselves and one another.  They strain against the unexpected manifestations of the conventional within themselves and certainly within their new spouses; they cannot quite reconcile their “laugh at everything, all their sacred shibboleths” philosophy with their sexual jealousies and their underlying agita over the day-to-day business of life, love and death in a “marvelous age” of technological developments, cosmetic enhancement and impending world war.  An abiding, spirited, determined, even argumentative love is a welcome buttress in times such as those, and, indeed, such as these. 

[ I overheard the critic for the Niagara Gazette, who gave the production 4 stars out of 5 in his review, at intermission saying that my program notes made him want to gag.  That, of course, is his perogative, however tactlessly expressed.]