Great fun and highly watchable

Private Lives, Oldham Coliseum

Private Lives then: fey, camp, clipped and the epitome of Thirties sophistication, or a knockabout romp in which the two leads knock lumps off each other?

It’s always pretty much been the former, mostly thanks to endless revivals with leading men trying to be Noel Coward.

But times have changed and now directors keep Coward in his box, proving that Private Lives is actually a Thirties comedy like few others: raw, sexy and not unviolent, building to a scrap between two former partners who, combined, have the emotional age of a baby amoeba. That’s the sort of energy director Robin Herford has gone for here, and with great success — which makes the worry on first seeing leading man James Simmons easier to dismiss.

You expect Coward as leading man Elyot, but you get the sunken-cheeked, handsome but rather dissipated-looking Simmons, who looks a little like a convict who has stolen a dinner jacket to make good his escape.

Only when you see him with Jackie Morrison (as Amanda) flailing round her apartment in a sexually-charged version of assault and battery do you realise that Simmons actually suits this newly-masculine Elyot rather well. The pair give an idea of how racy this all was 80 years ago, with sex outside marriage, fights among the upper classes, betrayed partners forgiving and forgetting in that civilised English way — and all in front of the maid (Tess Alshibaya).

The couple are well matched, he rough-hewn and selfish, she slight and sexy in her jammies. They even sing a couple of numbers from the Coward songbook when not fighting.

In case you don’t know the play, Elyot and Amanda, divorced for five years after a knockabout three-year marriage, but still in love, have turned up at a French hotel on honeymoon with new partners, Sybil and Victor. And in adjoining rooms too.

Cue the pair dumping their partners and making for Paris, where they realise they really can’t live with each other after all, and have infected sweet but dim Sybil (Maeve Larkin) and Victor (Christopher Naylor, a sort of Simon Cadell with fists) with the same boorish behaviour in the process.

Taken at a breakneck pace, the play flies along in a hail of splintered shellac.

Great fun and highly watchable; the Coliseum starts 2011 as it hopefully means to go on.