Private Lives

Theatre Royal Bath is delighted to be hosting this new production of Private Lives, the inaugural show from Nigel Havers’ new theatre company which will be touring the country with a line-up of theatrical gems.

Launching the company, Coward’s dazzling comic masterpiece is both a scintillatingly witty and scathingly vitriolic study of the rich and reckless in love.

The Olivier Award-winning Patricia Hodge, one of the country’s most loved actresses, plays Amanda. Nigel Havers, ever suave and thoroughly charming, plays Elyot, the role taken by Noël Coward himself in the original production in 1930. Astonishingly, it is the first time Nigel Havers has appeared in a Coward play on stage.  Dugald Bruce-Lockhart plays Victor and Natalie Walter plays Sibyl, with Aïcha Kossoko as Louise.

Elyot and Amanda, who were once married to each other, find themselves on honeymoon with their new partners, in the same hotel in the South of France and admiring the vista from adjoining balconies. Their initial horror evaporates as, within no time at all, they’re sharing cocktails, cigarettes and a romantic serenade and rekindling their previous passion. Caring nothing for scandal, they elope to Amanda’s Paris flat where their lust thaws as quickly as it had reignited and they resume the slanging match which drove them apart in the first place.

"One of the most satisfyingly constructed and brilliantly executed high comedies in the English language" Daily Telegraph

"A masterclass in wit" Time Out

"Hinges on the two great driving forces of English life - sex and class" Sunday Times