At first, the audience thinks Kim Cattrall has withered inside herself. But this pinched, slightly hunched pretty blonde woman is not Kim, but Lisa Dillon, superbly well cast as Elyot Chase’s second wife, Sybil, and an obviously unsatisfactory replacement for the real thing.

Sybil and Elyot stand gloomily on the hotel balcony in Deauville, designed by Rob Howell with a battery of green shutters and some strangely unappealing white muslin curtains, which billow in the wind and make the coming and going a little complicated.

Matthew MacFadyen’s sullen, heavily built Elyot is not happy. He scatters a handful of wedding confetti he happens to find in his jacket pocket like a memento mori. Only when Kim Cattrall does appear, shimmering with malice and sexuality, dressed in a white towel, does he cheer up. Hostilities can be resumed and the honeymoon’s on hold.

Cattrall’s Amanda – a catty Amanda who caterwauls – has booked into the same hotel with her new husband, Simon Paisley Day’s hilariously bovine Victor, who is the absolute personification of a knitted eyebrow. It’s one of the great virtues of Richard Eyre’s clever, fast-moving production (one interval taken after the first act) that Victor and Sybil will, you feel, one day enjoy hating each other as much as do Elyot and Amanda.

Hate is the flip side of love. Amanda and Elyot can’t live together without fighting, but they can’t live apart, either. Not only, as Nicholas Wright reminds us in a programme note, is Coward’s 1930 effortless comedy one of the best in the language about sexual attraction, it’s also a brilliant analysis of the mutability of that attraction and its farcical dynamic.

There is a palpable physicality to all this, climaxing in the famous second act bun fight in which McFadyen’s Elyot has devised a novel torture for Amanda: a handful of ice cubes down the back of the neck. I like the way the exit to Paris is put into comic relief by the bulwark presence of the French maid (Carline Lena Olsson) who doesn’t pout or twitter but acts as a sort of domestic shock absorber.

There have not been that many outstanding revivals of Private Lives since Maggie Smith and Robert Stephens tore strips off each other, but this one has a freshness and elan that still takes you by surprise and honours both the musicality of Coward’s perfect prose and his brittle humanity.

- by Michael Coveney