Private Lives

Amanda has just married Victor and gone on her honeymoon. Elyot has just married Sybil and gone on his honeymoon. To the same hotel. Elyot and Amanda are about to find out all over again why they got divorced in the first place.

The censors did their best to ban the play when Coward wrote it in 1930 (as a vehicle for himself) and it has been refusing to behave for 80 years now. Its wit is definitive, its plotting almost perfect, and its critique of modernity dazzling. The great theatrical adventurer Ralph Myers finally gives himself a directing gig and his task is almost ridiculously pleasurable: to direct Toby Schmitz in Private Lives.

Toby Schmitz and Noel Coward. Say no more.

Well, we’ll say a little more.

The rest of Australia has been seeing a lot more of Schmitz lately – he toured as Benedick in Bell Shakespeare’s blisteringly funny Much Ado About Nothing in 2011 and stars in Melbourne Theatre Company’s production of The Importance of Being Earnest from November. It’s some consolation that Schmitz is back in a play that would appear to be tailor-made for his exceptional comic talents: Noel Coward’s Private Lives, the play that rehabilitated the playwright’s career.

Belvoir artistic director Ralph Myers always fantasises about directing productions, he says... but never gets around to it. Myers hasn't been in the director’s chair since 2008. “So I thought I might as well give myself a job. I thought long and hard about what I wanted to do and I realised I wanted something that I didn’t really need to think about whether or not it was a good play. Private Lives is one of the most perfectly written plays ever. It’s kind of a perfect play. It’s funny, it’s savage, it’s incisive, it’s beautifully structured, it’s got five amazing characters, it’s brilliant. And it’s been crying out for a version that isn’t people walking around in dinner suits and drinking martinis.”