ELYOT: Don’t quibble, Sibyl.
AMANDA: What’s so horrible is, that one can’t stay happy!
ELYOT: Oh, darling! Don’t say that!
AMANDA: It’s true! The whole business is a very poor joke!
Ah, les idiots!
(Louise, the French maid’s accurate assessment of the play’s four protagonists.)
Executive summary
‘Private Lives’ is one of Coward’s more popularly and regularly revived plays. It depicts a couple, Elyot and Amanda who divorced five years ago but who have both just remarried and who, on the first evening of their honeymoons with their new spouses (Sibyl and Victor, respectively), discover that they are staying in adjacent rooms at the same hotel.
The play is set on the connected balconies outside their respective hotel rooms where they first realise they’re staying next door to each other. First of all they each have bitter arguments with the new spouses who both leave the rooms in high dudgeon. Then they have the first of many bitter fights between themselves before, improbably enough, deciding to run away and abandon their new partners (on the first night of their honeymoons!).
The second act is set in Amanda’s Paris apartment and consists entirely of the pair alternately being lovey-dovey and trembling on the brink of having sex, then some tiny trifle sparks an argument, and next thing they are screaming abuse at each other and, in climactic moments, slapping and throwing things at each other. At the height of the fiercest argument their estranged spouses, having tracked them down to Paris, enter and witness their latest slanging match.
The third act is set the next morning as the foursome awaken (Sibyl slept on the sofa, Victor in an armchair), Elyot and Amanda treating everything as normal (which is was during their stormy three-year marriage) while the new spouses are puzzled and confused. A lot of banter takes us to a position where the new spouses offer to divorce the central figures but a supposedly civilised breakfast itself degenerates into a fierce argument, this time between Victor and Sibyl. Looking on, for once watching a different couple screaming their heads off, unexpectedly makes Elyot and Amanda feel moony and spoony again and, while Victor and Sibyl come to blows, Elyot and Amanda pack their backs and quietly sneak out the front door.
Act 1
The terrace of a hotel in the South of France.
Onto the balconies outside their rooms come first one couple then the other. First Elyot and his new wife, Sibyl. They’re all lovey-dovey at first but her persistence in asking fairly innocent questions about his first marriage several times makes him lose his temper but they manage to recover and go into their room to dress for dinner.
This clears the scene for the second couple, Amanda and her new husband Victor. Same thing happens. They are all lovey-dovey at first until the subject of her first marriage comes up and Victor dwells on how awful Elyot was to her. But they manage to recover. The parallelism is deliberately emphasised. For example both Sibyl and Victor ask Elyot and Amanda where they went on their first honeymoons and both reply St Moritz.
What for me is the central issue of the play, the conflict between the imaginative and liberated Elyot and Amanda, and the boring Sibyl and narrow conventional Victor, is first sounded.
VICTOR: Well, I’m glad I’m normal!
AMANDA: What an odd thing to be glad about! Why?
VICTOR: Well, aren’t you?
AMANDA: I’m not so sure I’m normal!
VICTOR: Of course you are, Mandy! Sweetly, divinely normal!
AMANDA: I haven’t any peculiar cravings for Chinamen or old boots, if that’s what you mean!
VICTOR: Mandy!
AMANDA: I think very few people are completely normal, really… deep down in their private lives. It all depends on a combination of circumstances.
Even Amanda’s very mild flight of fancy, mentioning Chinamen or old boots (!) is enough to freak Victor out. He just thinks of it as the kind of thing which shouldn’t be said out loud. ‘All stuff and nonsense.’ Exactly. That’s the mentality that Elyot and Amanda, and even more so the audience, come to realise they’re up against.
Victor goes in to have a bath i.e. give Amanda ten minutes alone on the balcony during which Elyot returns to his side of the balcony, lights a cigarette, waiting for Sibyl to finish putting on her make-up.
The orchestra down on the hotel dining room starts playing ‘Moonlight becomes you’ and Elyot starts humming along. Amanda, sitting on her side of the balcony, hears him and she starts singing along. Elyot hears her and they face each other across the partition of the two balconies. After a few polite remarks Amanda says she must go and goes into her room.
Sibyl comes out onto their balcony and discovers Elyot in a flustered state. With no explanation why he tells her they must pack up and leave straightaway. She absolutely refuses and he goes into one of, what we will come to realise, are his psychotic rages, complete with really startlingly violent exclamations:
ELYOT: If there’s one thing in the world that infuriates me, it’s sheer wanton stubbornness! I should like to cut off your head with a meat axe!
Understandably, Sibyl goes into hysterics as Elyot turns and stomps into their room, and she follows him.
This of course leaves the stage clear for Victor and Amanda to come stomping out onto their half of the balcony. Amanda has clearly made the same demand of Victor, that they leave the hotel straightaway and drive back to her place in Paris.
To persuade him she has concocted an entirely fictitious story about this being the very hotel where her sister committed suicide (!) and her having to accompany the body back to England. Victor sees through this instantly and accuses her of telling a lie to which she straightaway admits.
This, like the passage about the Chinamen, should be flagging to Victor (it certainly flags to us) that Amanda overflows with high-spirited fancies and imaginings and so is a) utterly unsuited to blunt imagination-free Victor and b) addicted to the equally frivolous, fanciful Elyot. It is the quality of their free-associating, untrammeled senses of humour which binds them.
She then lies again, telling Victor they have to leave because Elyot is here but for some reason not telling the truth, that he’s in the next door room, but making up another lie that she saw him down in the street. In a white suit. Running. Victor, reasonably enough, points out that she’s lying again.
Victor refuses to leave and go to Paris, which triggers Amanda to a furious denunciation:
AMANDA: I see quite clearly that I have been foolish enough to marry a fat old gentleman in a club armchair! You’re a pompous ass! Pompous ass! That’s what I said, and that’s what I meant!
Stiff with dignity, Victor says he will be in the bar and stomps out. Over on Elyot’s side of the balcony, he and Sibyl come out just long enough for her to tell him it’s the unhappiest day of her life. She says she’s off to have dinner and Elyot hopes it will choke her.
Not the height of sophistication, maybe.
And so to the final part of the act, with Amanda and Elyot finding themselves alone on the balcony. She asks for a cigarette and joins him on his side of the balcony. At first they have a typical angry outburst, blaming each other for ruining things. But slowly they remember past happiness and end up mocking each other’s partners. The band down in the dining room starts playing their tune, ‘Moonlight becomes you’, and they both soften, and Amanda delivers one of Coward’s most famous quotes.
AMANDA: Extraordinary how potent cheap music is.
In this mood they remember all the good times and, implausibly but at the same time believably, suddenly admit that they still love each other. They are appalled at the catastrophe they’ve brought upon themselves.
AMANDA: No, wait! This is terrible, something strange’s happened to us, we’re not sane!
ELYOT: We never were.
He tells her to stop shilly-shallying, calls her idiotic and suddenly they’re having one of their rows. She stops it and says they need to have a safe word or phrase, something either of them can say and which will pull them up, make them keep a 5-minute, no a 2-minute silence, while they calm down. Jokingly Elyot suggests ‘Solomon Isaacs’ and a few minutes later when they flare up into another argument, says it, they are silent, calm down and are together again. On one level they think this little device will somehow obviate their addiction to flaring rows but, as the next two acts will amply demonstrate, it won’t.
And so they rush off, grabbing the bags they haven’t unpacked yet, heading down to the garage where her car is.
Leaving the stage empty for Victor and Sibyl to enter, call their partners’ names, look around and be puzzled by their absence. In reality there’d be calling Reception, running round upset. For the purposes of the play they both accept the situation very demurely and Victor invites Sibyl over to have one of the cocktails which he brought out for Amanda 15 minutes earlier.
And with a bitter-sweet wistfulness, he suggests a toast ‘To absent friends’, which is far more for the purpose of theatrical neatness, to neatly round off the act, than any attempt at psychological realism.
Act 2
Amanda’s flat in Paris, a few days later.
Elyot and Amanda have just had a little dinner and ponder their situation. They wonder if they’ll remarry. They agree to shorten their safe phrase from ‘Solomon Isaacs’ to ‘Sollocks’. (The ex-dustman in me thinks ‘bollocks’ might have been better.)
Almost every conversational gambit leads to the flaring of an argument, such as when they stray into listing other people they had affairs with after they divorced.
They have an attractive married habit of inventing surreal nonsense. ‘Did you notice Lady Bumble blowing all those shrimps through her ear trumpet?’ and the like. Or: ‘ It must be so nasty for poor animals, being experimented on! Well, not when the experiments are successful! – Why, in Vienna, I believe you can see whole lines of decrepit old rats, carrying on like Tiller girls!’
They kiss passionately but Amanda tells him to stop because it’s too soon after dinner, at which he breaks off in a huff. And so on. One minute he’s shouting ‘Don’t patronise me’ and they cry the safe word. Moments later he’s playing her favourite song on the piano and she softens etc. It ends for the umpteenth time for a full-throated kiss.
While Elyot and Amanda cannot live without each other, neither can they live with each other. They argue violently and try to outwit each other, just as they did during their stormy marriage.
The phone rings, someone asking for a Madame Duvallon, Elyot answers in his high surreal mode that Madame Duvallon has just left for Madagascar. Amanda is relieved; she thought it was them catching up with them. Who? Oh all the people who pursue you and pull you down. At which point there’s a little author’s message:
AMANDA: Don’t laugh at me, I’m serious!
ELYOT: You mustn’t be serious, my dear one! It’s just what they want!
AMANDA: Who’s they?
ELYOT: All the futile moralists who try to make life unbearable. Laugh at them. Be flippant! Laugh at all their sacred shibboleths! Flippancy brings out the acid in their damned sweetness and light.
AMANDA: Darling, I think you’re talking nonsense!
ELYOT: So is everyone else, in the long run! Let’s be superficial, and pity the poor philosophers. Let’s blow trumpets and squeakers, and enjoy the party as much as we can, like very small, quite idiotic school children.
Trouble is every one of these moments of silliness and closeness spirals, trips a switch, turns on a sixpence about a squabble about something trivial and then they’re in full throttle insulting rage within seconds. ‘You’re quite intolerable.’ ‘Ridiculous ass.’ ‘If you insist on being so boorish and idiotic.’ ‘You disagreeable pig!’ ‘You spiteful little beast!’
She puts on a record, he turns it off saying it’ll wake the neighbours, he turns it off again and scratches it, so she takes it off the turntable and smashes it over his head at which he slaps her in the face making her burst into tears, ‘hate you, I hate you!’ and then slaps him: ‘You’re a vile–tempered, evil–minded little vampire!’
They throw things at each other and roll around on the floor hitting each other with pillows, shouting this is the end and ‘I hope I never see you again in my life’, before storming off to their separate rooms.
For some unexplained reason, it is at precisely this moment that the spouses they abandoned in the South of France, Sibyl and Victor, walk in.
Act 3
Amanda’s flat the next morning.
Next morning the French maid arrives and is appalled by the mess everywhere, then discovers Sibyl on the sofa and Victor sleeping in a chair.
Once woken up, Victor and Sibyl agree they must see this thing through. They have somehow tracked the errant couple to Amanda’s flat in Paris. Amanda emerges from her room fully dressed, calmly accepts their presence and announces that she’s leaving immediately. When Sibyl knocks on Elyot’s door he tells her to go away and she bursts into hysterical wails.
Elyot evades the situation with studied flippancy, while Amanda brightly behaves as if they’re welcome guests on a lovely Paris morning. When Elyot speaks Amanda tells him to shut up and accuses him:
AMANDA: I have been brought up to believe that it’s beyond the pale for a man to strike a woman!
ELYOT: A very poor tradition! Certain women should be struck regularly, like gongs.
Amanda takes Sibyl off to a bedroom to freshen up and Victor challenges Elyot to a fight. But Elyot manages to outwit him with his flippancy, ending up by accusing Victor of not being a proper man.
Sibyl and Amanda emerge from the bedroom and themselves have a fight ending with insults.
AMANDA: Heaven preserve me from nice women!
SIBYL: Your own reputation ought to do that!
AMANDA: Oh, go to hell!
If you enjoy watching middle class people argue and insult each other, this is the perfect night out for you.
Victor and Amanda squabble about whether they’re in love with each other. The real issue here, the dichotomy, isn’t between men and women, it’s between the imaginative – those who enjoy absurdist flights of fancy (Elyot and Amanda) – and the dim and unimaginative (Victor and Sibyl).
It’s the same basic dichotomy as between Larita and the dim Whittaker family in ‘Easy Virtue’ in fact Sibyl ends up hurling exactly the same accusations at unimaginative Victor as Larita does in the earlier play, they read like leftover lines from the earlier, far more powerful, play.
VICTOR: Making stupid rotten jokes!
SIBYL: I thought what Elyot said was funny!
VICTOR: Well, all I can think is, is that you must have a very warped sense of humour!
SIBYL: That’s better than having none at all!
VICTOR: I fail to see what humour there is in incessant trivial flippancy!
SIBYL: You couldn’t be flippant if you tried until you were blue in the face!~
VICTOR: I shouldn’t dream of trying!
SIBYL: You must be awfully sad, not to be able to see any fun in anything!
The end of the play portrays a stiff and tense breakfast, as Louise brings in a tray with coffee and brioches. Predictably this also degenerates into an argument, surprisingly, between Victor and Sibyl as Elyot and Amanda look on in silent astonishment. It brings them together to watch another couple behaving like them, and they kiss and canoodle and then agree to sneak out while the other pair are distracted.
And so they sneak out while the other couple are completely absorbed in their fierce arguing, which reaches the same level as theirs the night before, the play ending with Sibyl slapping Victor and screaming at him.
She slaps his face hard, and he takes her by the shoulders and shakes her like a rat.
THE END
Thin
Like all his early plays Coward wrote it at lightning speed, sketching the plot in two weeks and actually writing it in four days. The result is entertaining but, as countless critics observed at the time, thin.
It has been described as ‘tenuous, thin, brittle, gossamer, iridescent and delightfully daring’. Allardyce Nicoll called it ‘amusing, no doubt, yet hardly moving farther below the surface than a paper boat in a bathtub’. The Manchester Guardian commented, ‘Mr Coward certainly had not flattered our intelligence. The play appears to be based on the theory that anything will do provided it be neatly done.’ The Observer also thought that the play depended on brilliant acting but thought the characters unrealistic.
When the text was published, The Times called it ‘unreadable’ and The Times Literary Supplement found it ‘inexpressibly tedious’ in print but acknowledged that its effectiveness on stage was ‘proved by the delight of a theatrical audience.’
You’d have thought none of them had seen or read a Noel Coward play before. Surely they’re all like that, aren’t they?
Mirrors and pairs
I’m starting to notice Coward’s recurring techniques. An obvious one is structural pairing or doubling. All I mean is that ‘Fallen Angels’ portrays two couples, as does ‘Private Lives’. ‘Fallen Angels’ has two almost identical scenes where the naughty women tell the other’s husbands that the other has gone off to have an affair with the mystery Frenchman. In ‘Private Lives’ the doubling or mirroring of scenes between each of the divorced pair and their respective spouses is obvious.
This mirroring or patterning is pretty obvious. You can see how it helped Coward organise and construct his entertainments, and also how it provides pleasure to the audience, consciously or unconsciously savouring the comic patterning. (Probably consciously, it’s pretty damn obvious.)
(Incidentally, Elyot claims to have a ‘presentiment’ of disaster, which echoes the way Julia and Jane at the start of ‘Fallen Angels’ claim to have had presentiments.)
And Elyot and Amanda sneaking out at the end is the same as the four guests sneaking out of the Bliss house at the end of ‘Hay Fever’. The ‘sneaking out’ theme.
Shouting
Coward has this reputation for sophistication, and his characters are certainly pukka middle class types, they dress for dinner and drink cocktails. But one of their most striking features is how quickly the characters all resort to shouting. The climax of ‘The Vortex’ is an extended confrontation between mother and son packed with tears and shouting and recriminations. The two women in ‘Fallen Angels’ get drunk and shout and accuse each other. I was surprised that the alleged comedy ‘Hay Fever’ consists of quite so many arguments between the misnamed Bliss family and their disconcerted guests.
And frankly shocked that, after a deceptive opening five minutes, this play consists of two couples having extended filthy shouting matches, first with their new spouses, and then the two protagonists getting locked into this pattern of lovey-dovey kissy-kissy which every time degenerates into another shouting match, a grim cycle which lasts for the whole of the rest of the play.
ELYOT: If you don’t stop screaming, I’ll murder you.
Shouting and screaming abuse, threatening to kill your new wife… that’s pretty much the opposite of sophistication, isn’t it? Quite a few of these scenes could come out of Eastenders at its chavviest.
Wife-beating, battery and assault
If this was a new play being touted around now, in 2025, I doubt if it would find a backer. Nowadays we call things like this ‘domestic abuse’, ‘wife-beating’ and ‘assault’. The neighbours would call the cops to the scene of a ‘domestic’ and both parties would be arrested. Not so easy to make a comedy out of that. And yet the play is as popular as ever and celebrated for its light, charming wit.
1976 TV version
Starring Penelope Keith and Alec McCowen as the leads.
I don’t like Alec McCowen, he’s ugly isn’t he, in no way the stylish, debonair figure you associate with Coward and cocktails? And creepy. When he’s being lovey-dovey to Amanda I could feel my flesh creep. Although I suppose his jokey, tricksy manner suits the character of Elyot, with his mad flights of fancy and his imaginative subversion of pompous, unimaginative Victor.
Penelope Keith isn’t really an actress, more a cartoon caricature of herself. My generation entirely associate her with the sitcom ‘The Good Life’ in which she was always prim and controlled, so it’s disconcerting to see her a) shouting her head off and b) planting big-mouthed kisses on ugly Alec. Both are rather disgusting and certainly not entertaining. It felt like watching your parents smooching at a party, toe-curlingly embarrassing.
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