Ninety minutes listening to a bickering couple may not be everyone's cup of tea, but the dialogue in Private Lives is managed so cleverly, coming in waves of affection and fighting, the smallest things again leading to heated arguments, that I finally was won over. Moreover, the ending is very original.
Private Lives is a comedy of manners about a divorced couple who, while honeymooning with their new spouses, discover that they are staying in adjacent rooms at the same hotel (Coward makes unashamed use of coincidence to kick-start the plot!). Despite a perpetually stormy relationship, they realize that they still have feelings for each other.
[Noël Coward and Gertrude Lawrence
smoking and "posing as mirror opposites"
in the Broadway production of Private Lives (1931)]
It was a good thing that playwright Noël Coward caught influenza when visiting Shanghai in 1930, and had to convalesce in Room 314 at the Cathay Hotel by the Bund (since 1949 the Peace Hotel, a big, old pile where I have also stayed once in a previous life). He spent the two weeks usefully by sketching out a new play, "Private Lives, An Intimate Comedy," and then completing the actual writing in only four days.
The lives in question are those of the young, wealthy divorcees Elyot and Amanda, who, following a volatile three-year-long marriage, have been divorced for the past five years. Their problem is that they both have rather large egos. They used to love each other passionately, but couldn't stop their arguments from getting out of hand. During their stormy marriage they always tried to outwit each other, arguing violently. They simply couldn't love each other without fighting constantly.
In the opening scene, both are newly married to the much duller partners Sybil and Victor, but by chance they are honeymooning in adjacent suites of a sumptuous hotel in Deauville, on the coast of Normandy in northwest France (Deauville with its marinas and seaside casino attracted many artists as well as "the idly rich"; it is known perhaps above all for its role in Proust's In Search of Lost Time where its is called "Balbec").
The somewhat naive Sybil, by the way, clearly lacks the strong character that Amanda has, and Victor is a rigid and ridiculously conservative figure - through him traditional male roles are in fact satirized. Victor and Sybil together look like a standard, traditional couple. In contrast, Elyot and Amanda are equals in all respects and are both a bit androgynous. Amanda is an independent modern woman with a short hairstyle, who suggests the jazz age and its freedoms. She enjoys popular music and likes to dance to songs from a gramophone. Her advanced views include a challenge to male sexual hypocrisy, for when Elyot remarks that "it doesn’t suit women to be promiscuous," she retorts "It doesn’t suit men for women to be promiscuous" - in only 40 years, we have come a long way from a play like Pinero's The Second Mrs Tanqueray, in which a woman who was "promiscuous" in her younger years, is ostracized by society.
Elyot and Amanda separately beg their new spouses to leave the hotel
with them immediately, but both new spouses refuse to co-operate and
each storms off to dine alone. As the sudden meeting again fires the spark between Elyot and Amanda, they start regretting ever having divorced. Finally, they abandon their new spouses and
run off together to Amanda's flat in Paris.
[Gertrude Lawrence and Noël Coward play the love scene
in the Broadway production of Private Lives (1931)]
The second act is laid in this flat and we spend the evening with the reunited couple. They have devised a code word "Sollocks" to stop their arguments from getting out of hand. They kiss passionately, and there is even a hint of a love scene which was nearly censored in Britain as too risqué. But they are still the same people and the new-found harmony cannot last. They start arguing violently again, mostly about insignificant and nonsensical things. Their argument escalates to a point of fury (also helped by the cognac that Elyot has rather liberally consumed), as Amanda breaks a record over Elyot's head, and he retaliates by slapping her face. Then at the height of their biggest fight, Sibyl and Victor walk in - they have finally located their partners and want to talk to them. But as Amanda and Elyot have locked themselves into separate bedrooms, such a discussion will have to wait until the morning.
The next morning, in the third and last act, we witness a series of farcical but emotionally chaotic interactions between the four characters. After meeting Sibyl and Victor, Amanda and Elyot start bickering again. It is then decided that neither of the new spouses will grant a divorce for a year, to give Amanda and Elyot time to confirm if this is really what they want. But tempers keep rising, and now Sibyl and Victor even begin to bicker with each other, defending their respective spouses. Amanda and Elyot realize therefore that Sibyl and Victor are as well (or as badly) suited to each other as they are. They forgive one another and sneak out, leaving the younger two together. As Elyot and Amanda silently tiptoe out, Victor and Sibyl have reached the point of mutual violence...
And then the curtain falls. The conventional ending we expect from the genre of romantic comedy - that of celebratory marriage - is given an ironic twist: Amanda and Elyot’s unstable reunion means a fresh set of divorces from the abandoned second spouses. This is a satisfying ending as Elyot and Amanda are again together, but also in the sense that the virus has spread, for now we have two bickering couples!
The British author and actor Noël Coward (1899-1973) wrote more than 50 highly polished comedies of manners. His greatest work was done in the second half of the 1920s and in the 1930s. As a person, he was known for his wit and flamboyance, and he carefully developed "a combination of cheek and chic, pose and poise," as it was called. I already knew his work through Design for a Living (1933) in the film adaptation by Ernst Lubitsch (with Miriam Hopkins, Frederic March and Gary Cooper). A poet and a painter both fall in love with the same woman and the trio agrees to try living together in a menage-a-trois. This is a very gracious film, and I liked it better in fact than the play which I read later (as a play I liked Private Lives better). Also see my article "Forbidden Pre-Code Films" at this blog.
[This post contains parts edited from the relevant article at Wikipedia]
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