Private Lives
- Robert Beale
- 4 hours ago
- 3 min read
Noel Coward
HER Productions
Hope Mill Theatre, Manchester
January 28-February 8, 2026: 2 hrs 20 mins
(also at Dukes Theatre Lancaster, February 24-28)
Private Lives is often regarded as a frothy comedy of manners with a frisson of sexual chemistry and some risque one-liners.
But there are much darker undertones to the play about two newly-married couples who arrive in the same hotel in France and share adjoining balconies. We soon find out that the new husband in one case and the new wife in the other have been married to each other previously, in a relationship that ended in acrimonious divorce.
These two are really what it’s all about, as we see them constantly lust after each other, row and fight and then make up, and by the end you want to know whether they will finally get back together and stay that way. Noel Coward wrote their roles for himself and Gertrude Lawrence.
In this production director Amy Gavin and her cast lay bare the normalisation of domestic violence that’s inescapable in the play. They don’t make it preachy – on the contrary, the wit is all still there, the canoodling is convincing, the characterisations are clear, and the pace is vigorous. But so are the fights.
Coward’s famous line that “Certain women should be struck regularly, like gongs” isn't just a clever quip for Elyot (his role), but a statement of how his relationship with Amanda (his ex) used to work and still does when he gets the chance.
Granted, she hits him back, but in at least one of the fights it really looks as if she gets hurt, and she undoubtedly comes off worse overall. It’s not just for tick-boxery that there’s a display of the National Domestic Abuse Helpline in the free, printed, programme sheet. Credit to fight director Adam Cryne (and to intimacy co-ordinator Heather Carroll) for these very vivid scenes.
HER Productions’ artistic director, Hannah Ellis Ryan, plays Amanda - she directed Blithe Spirit for them at Hope Mill a year ago and co-directed Macbeth with Amy Gavin last June - and, as with Karen Henthorn’s Madame Arcati in Blithe Spirit – one female performance here is outstanding and enhances the whole thing. This Amanda is no chicken, and seems to relish a punch-up with Elyot as much as the prospect of sex with him.
Charlie Nobel is Elyot, and makes him a much more repellent individual than the common expectation of a Noel Coward leading man. Rightly so, in this context, and making the relationship with Amanda a thing of horrible fascination, as you wonder whether two people who treat each other as they do can be good for each other in any way.
Inevitably, the two newlyweds (not to each other), Jack Elliot as Victor and Hope Yolanda as Sybil, pale into less significance by comparison, but they make his decent-but-boring role, and hers as a naive and jealous youngster, contrast well with the hypnotic duo.
Amy Gavin uses black-and-white video and still projection to fill in some back-stories for the four main roles (we see their weddings before the show starts; we also see Amanda with bruises, later on), which among other things places the story back in 1930 when it was first seen.
Costumes are in period, too, but though Hannah Bracegirdle’s sound design gives us nice scratching noises for the 78rpm records, the ones that get thrown around the stage look like vinyl albums, not paper-sheathed shellac. And would these accustomed francophiles have pronounced Deauville and the Place Vendome (not a kind of fish) the way they do?
There’s another subtext to the play that seems disturbing: when Coward wrote that other quoted line, that it’s “extraordinary how potent cheap music is” (he meant his own; cool self-deprecation), was he really telling us that cheap music plus alcohol is an adequate basis for romantic attraction that goes beyond the casual?
It will be interesting to see what the Royal Exchange Theatre production of this piece, coming in April, makes of it. This one has thrown down a challenge.
More info and tickets here
