Private Lives at the Royal Exchange Theatre – review

You don’t know what goes on behind closed doors, but you don’t have to wait long in Noël Coward’s 1930 comedy of manners. He doesn’t so much pull back as tear down the curtain of upper-class gentility for two wealthy, ostensibly respectable newlywed couples. And it’s not a pretty sight. Brace yourself for an increasingly hysterical slanging match, trading taunts and volleying vitriol as tempers fly and eventually fists do too.

The vow to love and to cherish hasn’t even lasted the honeymoon, where we find ex-couple Amanda and Elyot on holiday with their new spouses, Victor and Sybil. The mood sours and turns prickly as their previous relationships resurface – literally, when they discover who’s in the hotel room next door. We’re given a ringside seat in Blanche McIntyre’s consistently fun production. Designer Dick Bird cages the circular stage with silver railings in the first half like boxing ring ropes fashioned out of a wedding ring band. There’s a visible veneer with the set’s shine, gloss and polish. And act one’s black and white colour palette isn’t just about art-deco period detail but warring dichotomies.

Jill Halfpenny has an icily cool, acidically sharp voice as Amanda. But she’s the most inscrutable of the four – unruffled, not giving enough sense that Elyot’s insults bother her, so we lose some of the cruelty. Steve John Shepherd’s Elyot is also more ridiculous than vicious, his male chauvinism rolling off the tongue too lightly and easily. But he’s a total hoot, with a smarmy Cheshire-cat grin and an amusing irritable disdain to his voice, a purr switching into a snarl or short snap. As delightful as his vocal work is, we could do with more moments of physical comedy, such as Amanda ducking down after discovering Elyot, planting her horrified face into the couch.

The pair convincingly suggest how they confuse each other’s mutual awfulness for romantic compatibility, and perfectly portray how their marital warfare is a sport for them: a game of one-upmanship to see who can outdo the other with the most baroque attack. The domestic violence still jars and feels slightly clumsily handled. And McIntyre doesn’t make a case for the play and its attitudes to gender. But it’s well-balanced and calibrated, even if it could be slightly tauter at times to reach a wincing, peer-through-your-fingers pitch – mostly, it gets glee rather than gasps. After initially galloping through the lines with too steady a pace, the second half also suffers from a bumpy rhythm as we repetitively wait for them to fire back up after cooling off. But it chugs along pleasantly and swiftly.

Daniel Millar and Shazia Nicholls are good foils as Victor and Sybil, capturing how their fretfulness and piety are just as insufferable as Elyot and Amanda’s reckless narcissism. They pontificate about morals and decency – until the tables are turned, descending into roaring tirades of their own. As the stage revolves, we see Coward’s point that it’s one big cycle from love to hate and back again, endlessly blowing hot and cold, all of them ultimately as bad as each other, no matter their public appearance.

With the stage split down the middle, the couples and characters become two halves of the same whole. And yet, in spite of everything, Amanda and Elyot get their happily ever after: smiles on their faces as they stride off into the horizon at the end, arm in arm. Seemingly made for each other after all.