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Private Lives

Playhouse, Nottingham
From: Friday, 7th October 2011
To: Saturday, 22 October 2011

Our Review:

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Synopsis

A divorced couple are reunited whilst honeymooning with their second spouses. Moonlight on the Mediterranean - a beautiful young woman drifts onto a hotel balcony. A young man joins her. They embrace, drink in the scene. This is a dream of a honey moon come true. They part. The young man is alone. A band plays. On the next balcony another young woman appears. She sings a song. The young man gives a horrified gasp and freezes. He knows that tune only too well. And he knows that voice. He used to be married to it.

Our Review:

12 October 2011

According to director Giles Croft it was a chance meeting with them in the Playhouse bar after a show earlier in the year that led to him casting Janie Dee and Rupert Wickham in this hugely enjoyable comedy of manners. Chance it may be but there is certainly no real gamble involved in pairing this real-life husband and wife in one of Noel Coward�s most bankable plays.

Janie and Rupert play Amanda and Elyot, divorced for five years and now by the strangest of chances sharing adjacent balconies at a sumptuous hotel in France. Each now has a new partner and is about to share the first night of their honeymoon together.

It is clear from the start that the new relationships are doomed but watching Amanda and Elyot rekindle their still smoldering passion is tremendous fun.

As ever it remains a mystery as to how two such lively and charismatic characters end up hitched to such unsuitable new partners as Sibyl and Victor but the slightness of the plot � Coward knocked the play of...

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