Search results
Private Lives is a 1930 comedy of manners in three acts by Noël Coward. It concerns a divorced couple who, while honeymooning with their new spouses, discover that they are staying in adjacent rooms at the same hotel.
- Noël Coward
- 1930
May 22, 2017 · When Private Lives premiered in London in 1930, Noël Coward said that he wanted to stage a show replete with “cocktails, repartee, and irreverent allusions to copulation.” He started with a tantalizing premise: a comedy of manners that tells the story of Amanda (played by Freya Cunningham) and Eleanor (Jhanie Fender), divorced lovers who ...
Sep 14, 2023 · "Havers probably emerged from the womb sporting a Coward-esque silk dressing gown, and he’s clearly having a ball with the petulant yet maddeningly charming Elyot – particularly his fondness for flamboyant melodrama.
1931. Noël Coward and Gertrude Lawrence star in Private Lives on Broadway.
- Author Biography
- Plot Summary
- Characters
- Themes
- Style
- Historical Context
- Critical Overview
- Criticism
- Sources
- Further Reading
Noel Peirce Coward is celebrated as one of the most prominent and prolific talents of the modern British theater. His witty, sophisticated comedies were immensely popular in the early part of the twentieth century and have been widely performed ever since. A theatrical jack-of-all-trades, Coward made his mark not only as a playwright but as an acto...
Act I
The setting is the terrace of an elegant hotel on the French Riviera; two separate suites open onto it, from either side of the stage. This simple situation contains a number of remarkable coincidences, as the audience quickly learns in a series of brief, mirror-image episodes. Each suite is occupied by a honeymooning couple, fresh from the altar: Elyot and Sibyl Chase on one side, and Victor and Amanda Prynne on the other. Elyot and Amanda were each previously married, a matter of some anxie...
Act II
A few days later, the scene picks up the fugitive couple in Amanda’s well-appointed Paris flat, savoring their sudden happiness. They have sent the maid home and are relaxing in cozy domestic bliss. Throughout this Act, their rambling conversations reveal the mixed emotions of their situation. The ever-shifting flow of talk runs into three alternating streams: the exchange of romantic endearments, coupled with witty banter that parodies aristocratic manners; the revival of “old scores” from t...
Act III
At 8:30 the next morning, amid the debris from last night’s battle, Victor sleeps on a sofa blocking the doorway to Amanda’s room, while Sibyl is similarly encamped at Elyot’s door. Louise, the maid, arrives for work, waking the jilted spouses. Amanda soon emerges from her room with a packed suitcase and heads for the door; cut off from escape, she is “gracefully determined to rise above the situation.” Acting the role of the perfect hostess, she arranges for Louise to bring breakfast out. El...
Elyot Chase
The witty and cynical Elyot is the male lead, whose love/hate relationship with Amanda forms the centerpiece of Private Lives. Though his occupation (if any) is unidentified, he is wealthy and fashionable, accustomed to luxury, and self-indulgent. In conversation, his habit is to “be flippant” and mock traditional social conventions; if he has a philosophy, it lies in his refusal to ever be serious, in defiance of “all the futile moralists who try to make life unbearable.” He holds to no Grea...
Sibyl Chase
Sibyl is Elyot’s second wife, seven years younger than her husband; but although she is the newlywed “Mrs. Chase,” she is quickly thrown together with Victor Prynne by their shared fate. From the end of the first Act, she and Victor become a kind of “couple,” traveling together as they seek justice from their wandering spouses. As a couple, they balance the central pairing of Elyot and Amanda, and while they are the “wronged parties,” they are meant to receive little sympathy from the audienc...
Louise
Louise is the maid at Amanda’s Paris flat, a minor character; she appears briefly in Act III, primarily to serve breakfast to the four protagonists.
Public vs. Private Life
As a “comedy of manners,” Private Livesdeals with the conventions and social rituals by which a person presents their “public” self to the world—and with the “private” passions and motivations that lie beneath the veneer of etiquette and respectability. The title comes from a speech Amanda makes early in the first Act. “I think very few people are completely normal, deep down in their private lives,” she muses. “It all depends on a combination of circumstances;” given the right conditions, “t...
MEDIA ADAPTATIONS
1. A film adaptation of Private Liveswas released in December, 1931, by Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer. It starred Norma Shearer and Robert Montgomery as Amanda and Elyot, with Reginald Denny and Una Merkel as Victor and Sibyl. While it retained most of Coward’s story and dialogue, director Sidney Franklin also made significant alterations: extending the “set-up” in Act I while compressing the action of Acts II and III; and having the lovers escape not to a Paris flat but to a Swiss chalet. The film is...
TOPICS FOR FURTHER STUDY
1. Choose an episode of a television “situation comedy,” and compare its dialogue to that of Private Lives. In what ways do they differ? How is the humor in Coward’s play achieved in contrast to the humor of the sitcom? 2. Coward is often compared to an earlier British dramatist known for his satiric wit, Oscar Wilde. Read Wilde’s The Importance of Being Earnest (1895) and compare and contrast it with Private Lives. 3. Assume that Victor and Sybil divorce their spouses after the play ends and...
While Coward is known for his witty dialogue, his work is relatively short on quotable “punch-lines”or one-liners, the kind of which define the comedic style of writers like playwright Neil Simon (The Odd Couple) and filmmaker Woody Allen (Annie Hall). The humor of Private Lives depends greatly on its expert stagecraft and carefully-balanced constr...
Throughout the 1920s, and particularly during the Great Depressionof the 1930s, many of the most popular plays and films were light comedies set
Private Lives was a runaway hit when it debuted in 1930, and the play has remained popular in revivals ever since. In the initial production, Coward himself starred as Elyot opposite Gertrude Lawrence’s Amanda. The play was produced at London’s Phoenix Theatre, opening in September, 1930, after preview runs in Edinburgh, Birmingham, Manchester, and...
Tom Faulkner
Faulkner is a professional writer with a B.A. in English from Wayne State University. In this essay, he examines Coward’s treatment of gender-roles and marriage. As Noel Coward repeatedly insisted, Private Lives is a light comedy, intended to amuse and captivate its audience, rather than to teach moral lessons or advance a particular ideology. It is exactly the sort of popular work scholars may “murder to dissect:” to over-analyze its “deeper meanings” is to risk blinding ourselves to its gli...
WHAT DO I READ NEXT?
1. If you enjoy one play by Coward, the next logical step is to investigate his other works. Design for Living (1933), about a “progressive” romantic triangle, and Blithe Spirit (1941), about a man who is haunted by the meddling ghost of his first wife, share much of the style and sensibility of Private Lives. 2. Frederick Lewis Allen’s Only Yesterday: An Informal History of the 1920s (1931) and Since Yesterday: The 1930s in America(1940) are lively, readable histories of the twenties and thi...
Brendan Gill
In this review of a 1968 revival performance of Private Lives, Gill offers the opinion that this work is Coward’s finest and a prime example of skilled farce. The critic also states that the enduring appeal of the play is a fitting birthday present for Coward, whose seventieth anniversary was marked by the new production. Four of the most fruitful days of 1929 were surely those that Noel Coward, on a lazy holiday trip around the world, spent writing Private Lives. The first act of the play, w...
Atkinson, Brooks. Review of Private Lives in the New York Times, January 28, 1931; May 14, 1931. Brater, Enoch. “Noel Coward” in the Dictionary of Literary Biography, Volume 10: Modern British Dramatists, 1900-1945, edited by Stanley Weintraub, Gale, 1982. Coward, Noel. Introduction to Play Parade, Doubleday, 1933, p. xiii. London Daily Mail, repri...
Castle, Charles. Noel, Doubleday, 1972. Coward, Noel. Present Indicative, Doubleday, 1937; and Future Indefinite, Doubleday, 1954. Hoare, Philip. Noel Coward: A Biography, Simon & Schuster, 1995. Levin, Miller. Noel Coward, Twayne, 1968.
Plot Summary. Private Lives is a 1930 comedy play written by Noel Coward. It covers a divorced couple, Elyot and Amanda, who inadvertently visit the same hotel in adjacent rooms for their respective honeymoons with new spouses.
People also ask
Who plays Gertrude Lawrence in private lives on Broadway?
What is the theme of private lives?
Is private lives a good movie?
Who played Elyot in private lives?
Who is directing private lives?
Who plays Amanda in private lives?
Apr 26, 2023 · It is certainly very funny and stylish, but Noël Coward’s Private Lives might better be called an ‘unromantic comedy’. Within the cloak of its dazzling wit, it is in fact an excoriating portrait of love and marriage among the disaffected elite in the dying days of the Jazz Age.
