Private Lives
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. Despite a perpetually stormy relationship, they realise that they still have feelings for each other. Its second act love scene was nearly censored in Britain as too risqué. Coward wrote one of his most popular songs, "Some Day I'll Find You", for the play.
For other uses, see Private Lives (disambiguation).Private Lives
18 August 1930
King's Theatre, Edinburgh
English
A divorced couple unexpectedly honeymoon at the same place with their new spouses
A hotel in Deauville, France, and a flat in Paris in the 1930s
After touring the British provinces, the play opened the new Phoenix Theatre in London in 1930, starring Coward, Gertrude Lawrence, Adrianne Allen and Laurence Olivier. A Broadway production followed in 1931, and the play has been revived at least a half dozen times each in the West End and on Broadway. The leading roles have attracted a wide range of actors; among those who have succeeded Coward as Elyot are Robert Stephens, Richard Burton, Alan Rickman and Matthew Macfadyen, and successors to Lawrence as Amanda have included Tallulah Bankhead, Elizabeth Taylor, Elaine Stritch, Maggie Smith, Penelope Keith and Lindsay Duncan. Directors of new productions have included John Gielgud, Howard Davies and Richard Eyre. The play was made into a 1931 film and has been adapted several times for television and radio.
$_$_$DEEZ_NUTS#0__titleDEEZ_NUTS$_$_$
$_$_$DEEZ_NUTS#0__subtitleDEEZ_NUTS$_$_$
Background[edit]
Coward was in the middle of an extensive Asian tour when he contracted influenza in Shanghai.[1] He spent the better part of his two-week convalescence sketching out the play and then completed the actual writing of the piece in only four days.[1] He immediately cabled Gertrude Lawrence in New York to ask her to keep autumn 1930 free to appear in the play. After spending a few more weeks revising it, he typed the final draft in The Cathay Hotel in Shanghai and sent copies to Lawrence and his producer and manager, John C. Wilson, with instructions to cable him with their reactions.[2]
Coward received no fewer than 30 telegrams from Lawrence about the play. She first said that she had read the play and there was "nothing wrong with it that can't be fixed." Coward "wired back curtly that the only thing that was going to be fixed was her performance."[3] Lawrence was indecisive about what to do about her previous commitment to André Charlot. Coward finally responded that he planned to cast the play with another actress.[4] By the time he returned to London, he found Lawrence not only had cleared her schedule but was staying at Edward Molyneux's villa in Cap-d'Ail in southeastern France learning her lines.[5] Coward joined her, and the two began rehearsing the scenes they shared.
At the end of July they returned to London where Coward began to direct the production. Coward played the part of Elyot Chase himself, Adrianne Allen was his bride Sibyl, Lawrence played Amanda Prynne, and Laurence Olivier was her new husband Victor. Coward wrote Sibyl and Victor as minor characters, "extra puppets, lightly wooden ninepins, only to be repeatedly knocked down and stood up again."[6] He later insisted, however, that they must be credible new spouses for the lead characters: "We've got to have two people as attractive as Larry and Adrianne were in the first place, if we can find them."[7]
Rehearsals were still underway when the Lord Chamberlain took exception to the second act's love scene, labelling it too risqué in light of the fact the characters were divorced and married to others. Coward went to St. James's Palace to plead his case by acting out the play himself and assuring the censor that with artful direction the scene would be presented in a dignified and unobjectionable manner.[8] Coward repeats one of his signature theatrical devices at the end of the play, where the main characters tiptoe out as the curtain falls – a device that he also used in Present Laughter, Hay Fever and Blithe Spirit.[9]
The play contains one of Coward's most popular songs, "Some Day I'll Find You". The Noël Coward Society's website, drawing on performing statistics from the publishers and the Performing Rights Society, ranks it among Coward's ten most performed songs.[10]
$_$_$DEEZ_NUTS#2__titleDEEZ_NUTS$_$_$
$_$_$DEEZ_NUTS#2__descriptionDEEZ_NUTS$_$_$
$_$_$DEEZ_NUTS#2__heading--0DEEZ_NUTS$_$_$
$_$_$DEEZ_NUTS#2__description--0DEEZ_NUTS$_$_$
$_$_$DEEZ_NUTS#2__heading--1DEEZ_NUTS$_$_$
$_$_$DEEZ_NUTS#2__description--1DEEZ_NUTS$_$_$
$_$_$DEEZ_NUTS#2__heading--2DEEZ_NUTS$_$_$
$_$_$DEEZ_NUTS#2__description--2DEEZ_NUTS$_$_$
$_$_$DEEZ_NUTS#2__heading--3DEEZ_NUTS$_$_$
$_$_$DEEZ_NUTS#2__description--3DEEZ_NUTS$_$_$
$_$_$DEEZ_NUTS#2__heading--4DEEZ_NUTS$_$_$
$_$_$DEEZ_NUTS#2__description--4DEEZ_NUTS$_$_$
$_$_$DEEZ_NUTS#2__heading--5DEEZ_NUTS$_$_$
$_$_$DEEZ_NUTS#2__description--5DEEZ_NUTS$_$_$
$_$_$DEEZ_NUTS#2__heading--6DEEZ_NUTS$_$_$
$_$_$DEEZ_NUTS#2__description--6DEEZ_NUTS$_$_$
Critical reception[edit]
The original production received mixed reviews. Coward later wrote, "The critics described Private Lives variously as 'tenuous, thin, brittle, gossamer, iridescent, and delightfully daring'. All of which connoted in the public mind cocktails, repartee and irreverent allusions to copulation, thereby causing a gratifying number of respectable people to queue up at the box office."[74] The Times wrote, "What an entertaining play it is!", but wondered if any other performers could bring it off.[75] Allardyce Nicoll called it "amusing, no doubt, yet hardly moving farther below the surface than a paper boat in a bathtub and, like the paper boat, ever in imminent danger of becoming a shapeless, sodden mass."[76] The Manchester Guardian commented, "The audience evidently found it a good entertainment, but 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."[77] The Observer also thought that the play depended on brilliant acting and thought the characters unrealistic, though "None the less, for a couple of hours they are delicious company when Mr. Coward is master of unceremonious ceremonies."[78] The New Statesman discerned a sad side to the play in its story of a couple who can live neither with nor without each other: "It is not the least of Mr. Coward's achievements that he has ... disguised the grimness of his play and that his conception of love is really desolating."[79]
When the text was published, The Times called it "unreadable",[80] 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."[81] T. E. Lawrence, however, wrote, "The play reads astonishingly well ... superb prose."[82] The editor of The Gramophone greeted Coward and Lawrence's 1930 recording of scenes from the play as a success and added, "I wish that Noel Coward would find time to write a short play for the gramophone, for neither of these extracts has enough completeness to bear indefinite repetition."[83]
Literary analysis[edit]
Private Lives has been the subject of literary analysis under a range of literary theories. Coward expressed a dim view of such analyses: "Many years ago an earnest young man wrote a book about my plays. It was very intelligent and absolute rubbish."[84] In a 2005 article, Penny Farfan analyses the play from the point of view of queer theory, arguing that "the subversiveness of [Coward's] sexual identity is reflected in his work," and that Private Lives questions "the conventional gender norms on which compulsory heterosexuality depends."[85] Positing that the leading characters' portrayal as equals is evidence in support of this theory, Farfan instances the famous image (shown above) of Coward and Lawrence as Elyot and Amanda smoking and "posing as mirror opposites".[85] Coward himself pronounced the play "psychologically unstable",[86] and John Lahr in a 1982 study of Coward's plays writes, "Elyot and Amanda's outrageousness is used to propound the aesthetics of high camp – an essentially homosexual view of the world that justifies detachment.[87] However, in a 1992 article on "Coward and the Politics of Homosexual Representation", Alan Sinfield, examining gay aspects of Coward's major plays, mentions Private Lives only in passing.[88] The critic Michael Billington writes of the piece, "It is not a closet gay play but a classic about the mysterious charm of androgeny [sic]."[53]
The play has also been analysed as part of the theatre of the absurd. In a 1984 article, Archie J. Loss argues that nothing can ever happen in the relationship of Elyot and Amanda, because it is based on conflicting emotions: "they are bound to repeat themselves, playing out their scene again and again with different words and different props but always with the same result."[89] In a 2000 study of Coward, Jean Chothia instances surreal exchanges in the play, such as: "Have you ever crossed the Sahara on a camel?" "Frequently. When I was a boy we used to do it all the time. My Grandmother had a wonderful seat on a camel."[90]
$_$_$DEEZ_NUTS#5__titleDEEZ_NUTS$_$_$
$_$_$DEEZ_NUTS#5__subtextDEEZ_NUTS$_$_$
$_$_$DEEZ_NUTS#4__titleDEEZ_NUTS$_$_$
$_$_$DEEZ_NUTS#4__subtextDEEZ_NUTS$_$_$
$_$_$DEEZ_NUTS#7__titleDEEZ_NUTS$_$_$
$_$_$DEEZ_NUTS#7__subtextDEEZ_NUTS$_$_$
$_$_$DEEZ_NUTS#6__titleDEEZ_NUTS$_$_$
$_$_$DEEZ_NUTS#6__subtextDEEZ_NUTS$_$_$
$_$_$DEEZ_NUTS#3__titleDEEZ_NUTS$_$_$
$_$_$DEEZ_NUTS#3__subtextDEEZ_NUTS$_$_$
$_$_$DEEZ_NUTS#1__titleDEEZ_NUTS$_$_$
$_$_$DEEZ_NUTS#1__subtextDEEZ_NUTS$_$_$
$_$_$DEEZ_NUTS#1__answer--0DEEZ_NUTS$_$_$
$_$_$DEEZ_NUTS#1__answer--1DEEZ_NUTS$_$_$
$_$_$DEEZ_NUTS#1__answer--2DEEZ_NUTS$_$_$
$_$_$DEEZ_NUTS#1__answer--3DEEZ_NUTS$_$_$
$_$_$DEEZ_NUTS#1__answer--4DEEZ_NUTS$_$_$
$_$_$DEEZ_NUTS#1__answer--5DEEZ_NUTS$_$_$
$_$_$DEEZ_NUTS#1__answer--6DEEZ_NUTS$_$_$
$_$_$DEEZ_NUTS#1__answer--7DEEZ_NUTS$_$_$
$_$_$DEEZ_NUTS#1__answer--8DEEZ_NUTS$_$_$
$_$_$DEEZ_NUTS#1__answer--9DEEZ_NUTS$_$_$
$_$_$DEEZ_NUTS#1__answer--10DEEZ_NUTS$_$_$
$_$_$DEEZ_NUTS#1__answer--11DEEZ_NUTS$_$_$