Old-fashioned jazz music pipes up in the hushed darkness, and the lights suddenly illuminate a set with a whiff of the art deco – black-and-white checkered floor, identically twirling foliage. But only when the actors sidle, swagger or sashay their way into our eyeline does the fun truly begin. Exes Amanda and Elyot are on honeymoon in the same area with their new spouses, trying very hard to seem enthralled by various displays of banality and insipidness – until they run into each other again and throw caution to the wind.

“This fine line between the vintage and the fresh is deftly and skilfully trodden by the actors and the production”

Noel Coward’s tale of promiscuity, casual cruelty and couple-swapping has a biting wit reminiscent of Oscar Wilde. As Amanda, Elyot’s former wife and current affair partner, passive-aggressively makes nice with Sybil, his current wife, over coffee and rolls, one recalls a certain line from Algernon: “Women only [call each other sister] when they have called each other a lot of other things first.” But Private Lives is also a strikingly contemporary play for the era in which it was penned; full of acid wit and impassioned yelling and mutual vinyl-record-breaking. This fine line between the vintage and the fresh is deftly and skilfully trodden by the actors and the production. Plummy received pronunciation from Amanda and Elyot, and the presence of a gramophone, remind us that this is a period piece; but the vibrancy of the ever-shifting light design, and the supercharged energy of the performers, prevents things from ever feeling stale. The sound design is also strategic; little bursts of music guide us from one scene to the other or become the focus of an argument when played over-loudly from a record, but there is no constant soundtrack demanding specific emotions from the audience. We watch things unfold more naturalistically than that.

Kate Woodman is particularly captivating as Amanda, with a husky voice and tongue-in-cheek quality that remind one a little of Carey Mulligan. I appreciate, in addition, that this director and this cast are not afraid to lean into the astronomical levels of Camp that Coward intended – on the contrary, such Camp is played up. Flamboyant dressing gowns are donned, endless cigarettes are insouciantly smoked, piano jingles are bashed out, and screaming violence is enacted with almost disconcerting realism. A special mention should go to Iris Tadie, whose perfunctory appearances as Louise the maid, the only peripheral character, are rather scene-stealing in their succinct warmth and humour. Wait staff in rich-people comedies are often written as one-line ciphers that quickly recede into the background; I, for one, kept wanting Louise to come back.

“I appreciate that this director and this cast are not afraid to lean into the astronomical levels of Camp that Coward intended”

This is a deliberately wordy, if lucid, script to work with, laden with eloquent insults and sentence-spanning exclamations; but these actors make the delivery of their glitteringly obnoxious dialogue look all but instinctive. Their physical comedic timing is impeccable, as well; Nick Danby’s Victor flops, trips and skitters about like Cosmo from Singin’ In The Rain, while the bouts of histrionic weeping from Gabrielle Kurniawan’s Sybil manage to be simultaneously poignant and chuckle-inducing. Leo Morad, meanwhile, plays the cad that is Elyot with a kind of awe-inspiring naturalness that makes you want to jump up onto the stage and slap him (a surefire sign that he is doing his job well), yet conjures a believable and (despite everything) endearing chemistry with Woodman.

If I had a small bone to pick with this delight, it would be that some of the styling choices feel rather inconsistent. The accents, set and music suggest a specific jazz-age epoch (the Bench Theatre Havant website reminds us that “It was written in Shanghai in 1931 while Coward was recovering from a bout of influenza”), yet Amanda’s hair runs long, free and untamed for the most part, and Sybil’s luminous blue dress at the start feels more Strictly Come Dancing than Depression-era darling. Moreover, while I admire and applaud the actors’ formidable powers of vocal projection, there are a few moments in which it feels as though they are shouting for the sake of shouting. But I wouldn’t fundamentally alter much; this is a colourful and riotous night out, and the audience was frequently in paroxysms.

Catch Private Lives at the ADC from the 11th-14th of February 2026.