Gosh, darling: the Donmar has done something dreadfully beastly to one of Noel Coward’s most classic plays. Private Lives is now nearly a century old, and Michael Longhurst’s revival – marking 50 years since the playwright’s death – seems to regard it as a museum piece from the start. For much of the first act, half of the set is covered in dust sheets, as though it were an abandoned stately home. But the production’s preoccupation with how the play might now be considered problematic makes for a strange, unsatisfying evening.
Stephen Mangan and Rachael Stirling play Elyot and Amanda, the warring divorcees who accidentally end up honeymooning at the same hotel with their new respective spouses. An exasperated Elyot insists that he hates Amanda to his new wife Sibyl (Laura Carmichael); to new beau Victor (Sargon Yelda), Amanda declares her ex to be “a dreary subject for a honeymoon”. Except, of course, they are both in deep denial, walking disasters who are drawn to each other like magnets.
