The Royal Exchange’s recent renaissance under its newly installed artistic director, Selena Cartmell, continues apace with a sparkling revival of Noël Coward’s Private Lives. This is a production that deftly balances the play’s barbed wit with the art deco glamour of its setting, while allowing something darker to seep through the cracks: a distinctly Pinteresque unease beneath the polished surface.
Coward is often caricatured as the world-weary, dressing-gown-clad wit, all epigrams and elegance. But there has always been more to him than that. Ever since seeing the Citizens Theatre’s 1988 production of his early play The Vortex—with Maria Aitken and a startlingly young Rupert Everett—it has been clear to me that Coward’s work carries a sharper, more serious undercurrent. His outsider’s perspective, shaped by his own middle-class reinvention, lends his depiction of class and society a biting edge; hypocrisy and cant are never far from his sights.
Under the direction of Blanche McIntyre—who staged Pinter’s The Birthday Party here in 2013 —those darker resonances are brought into clearer focus. The comparison with Pinter may seem unlikely, yet both writers share an acute sensitivity to the tensions that simmer beneath social interaction. Language becomes a battleground; beneath the brittle charm lies something more volatile. Themes of betrayal and shifting power dynamics ripple through the play, unsettling its polished façade.
Coward may be less overtly menacing than Pinter, but here, in the sunlit Riviera of the 1920s, the dissonance is unmistakable. What begins as light, sophisticated comedy gradually reveals a more disquieting emotional terrain, where wit serves not just as entertainment, but as both weapon and shield.
It begins conventionally enough. Amanda (Jill Halfpenny) and Victor (Daniel Miller) are honeymooning in the south of France when malign coincidence installs, in the neighbouring suite, Elyot (Steve John Shepherd) and Sibyl (Shazia Nichols). Elyot and Amanda, of course, share a famously combustible past marriage, dissolved in acrimony. Noël Coward wastes little time: the amour four reignites, and by the interval the former couple have abandoned their respective new spouses in favour of each other.
Up to this point, director McIntyre offers something close to a textbook Private Lives: a polished, high-gloss comedy of manners in which the epigrams land cleanly and the aesthetic does much of the work. Dick Bird’s Art Deco set—sleek chrome, black onyx, white marble—evokes period and privilege with almost fetishistic precision. It is elegant, controlled, and knowingly superficial.
But the second half pushes decisively beyond that surface. Comprising the latter two acts, it tracks the disintegration of Amanda and Elyot’s rekindled romance into something far uglier: a relationship sustained as much by cruelty as by desire. Where many productions soften or sidestep Coward’s more troubling instincts, McIntyre leans into them. The pauses lengthen, the silences acquire weight, and the language is allowed its full, abrasive force, it is Pinteresque. Elyot’s assertion that ‘certain women deserve to be struck regularly, like a dog’, or his grotesque ‘Kiss me before your body rots’, lands without mitigation; Amanda’s own threats—she would ‘cut off your head with a meat axe’—are no less ferocious.
What emerges is not simply the familiar ‘merry war’ of equals, but something closer to mutually assured emotional destruction. Shepherd initially suggests a languid, Higgins-like superiority, his Elyot all cultivated charm and faintly amused condescension, before letting that mask slip into something colder and more calculated. Halfpenny, recalling Elizabeth Taylor (not least in a Cat on a Hot Tin Roof-style white gown), gives Amanda both allure and volatility; she is perhaps the more sympathetic presence, but no less complicit in the cycle of provocation and reprisal.
Bird’s design subtly tracks this descent. The second act’s setting, with its seedy Parisian garret overtones and looming skylight, strips away the Riviera gloss, while the slowly revolving stage—accelerating almost imperceptibly—mirrors the couple’s loss of control. It is an effective visual metaphor, though one that occasionally threatens to overstate the point.
The conclusion lands with a certain inevitability: Victor and Sibyl locked in a proxy battle of recrimination while Amanda and Elyot slip away once again, their pattern of escape and repetition intact. It is both funny and faintly desolating.
When Private Lives premiered in 1930, it scandalised; in the decades since, it has too often been reduced to brittle farce. McIntyre’s production restores some of its original sting, allowing the misogyny, vitriol and emotional violence to sit uncomfortably alongside the wit. Whether Coward would entirely endorse this darker emphasis is open to question—but it undeniably lends the play a renewed edge, and a relevance that more decorous revivals tend to evade.
Reviewer: Paul Wilcox
Reviewed: 1st April 2026
North West End UK Rating: