Private Lives Tickets

The plot revolves around Elyot (Toby Stephens) and Amanda (Anna Chancellor) who are glamorous, rich, reckless… and divorced. Five years later, their love for on another is unexpectedly rekindled when they take  adjoining suites of a French hotel while honeymooning with their new, younger, spouses – Sibyl (Anna-Louise Plowman) and Victor (Anthony Calf). Both divorcees seem to be happy with their new spouses but the chance encounter instantly reignites their passion for one another, and they fling themselves headlong into a whirlwind of love and lust once more, without a thought for partners present or turbulences past.

 

Sir Noël Coward originally drafted Private Lives in 1930 during an extensive Asian Tour in Shanghai after suffering from Influenza. Coward cast the popular West End and Broadway actress – Gertrude Lawrence as the original Amanda and himself as Elyot while Adrianne Allen played his bride – Sybil, and a young Laurence Olivier played Amanda’s groom – Victor. Initially Coward intended to have Sybil and Victor as minor characters, however he later insisted they must be credible new spouses for the lead characters. 

 

Toby Stephens, known for Edward Fairfax Rochester in BBC’s Jane Eyre and James Bond villain -Gustav Graves, follows in the footsteps of his parents, Robert Stephens and Maggie Smith, who were a famous Elyot and Amanda in the 60s. From the very beginning he suggests an edge of danger beneath Elyot’s witty well-spoken manner; this is a man who really believes ‘that certain women should be struck regularly, like gongs’. The miracle with Stephens’s Elyot is that such sentiments are combined with sudden moments of heart-melting charm.

 

Anna Chancellor, who is known for portraying ‘duckface’ in Four Weddings and a Funeral and Questular Rontok in The Hitchhikers Guide to the Galaxy, is equally fine in playing Amanda, who is unashamedly beyond the first flush of youth, and already recoiling from her ploddingly conventional new husband Victor’s touch in the first act.

 

Coward, born in London, was an English playwright, composer, director, actor and singer. He is known for writing plays; Hay Fever, Design for Living, Present Laughter and Blithe Spirit. At the outbreak of World War II he volunteered to help run the British Propaganda office in Paris and used his influence to increase moral amongst troops.

 

Private Lives has been revived several times in the West End and Broadway, going on tour in 1948 all over the US bar three states, grossing more than $1.5million. It was also adapted into a film in 1931, directed by Sidney Franklin, starring Norma Shearer and Robert Montgomery.