Private Lives

Misery is a spectator sport, which is why so many fictional romances end with the post-conjugal sunset: happily every after, like really good sex, is something we all want to believe in and hope to experience without necessarily needing to watch anyone else go at it. But marriage doesn't guarantee a happy ending: just ask Amanda (Kim Cattrall) and Elyot (Matthew Macfadyen), once red-hot lovers but now burned ex-spouses about to discover that fate or some other malign force has booked them into adjoining suites in Deauville - a fine way to begin their two latest attempts at marital bliss.

Noël Coward's 1930 play is as light and dangerous as a belladonna soufflé and a lot harder to mess up as long as attraction is part of the mix, for if Amanda and Elyot aren't horribly in love - so much so that one glimpse of the other is enough for them to abandon their new partners and flee together to Paris - then we are consuming nothing but hot air encased in well-turned phrases. Fortunately, Macfadyen and Cattrall, as directed by Richard Eyre, are entirely believable: the much-mentioned age gap is simply irrelevant, and the gloss they import from their successful television careers (him in 'Spooks', her in 'Sex and the City') is rather helpful: these days, we get the aristocracy we deserve, and given their good looks, sharp delivery and insatiable desire for attention, Amanda and Elyot would appear to be only a couple of decades short of a full celebrity profile.

She's shrill and insouciant, he's burly and obnoxious, and all's so fair in love and war that you want to strangle both of them - although not nearly as much as they soon want to strangle each other. After the energy of the first act, the curtain rises on Rob Howell's effete shagpad, which may be anachronistic but illustrates beautifully the troubles that wealth is heir to: it's difficult, admiring the scrolled ceiling, circular sofa and over-designed aquarium, not to suspect that this couple would quarrel a lot less if they had anything else to do with their time. Coward as class warrior is a little unlikely, but then 'Private Lives' plays expertly with notions of usefulness, from the hilarious nonsense lines ('Don't quibble, Sybil!') to the examination of that supposedly gainfully employed emotion, love. Perhaps this is why, despite the odd racist quip and a sublime disregard for the addled natives, the play has aged so well: decadence was never the exclusive preserve of the inter-war Bright Young Things, and somewhere, beneath the romantic clichés our culture force-feeds us, we all know it.