Private Lives * Written at Noel Coward * Directed by means of Howard Davies * Starring Alan Rickman and Lindsay Duncan * Richard Rodger Theatre.

Private Lives * Written at Noel Coward * Directed by means of Howard Davies * Starring Alan Rickman and Lindsay Duncan * Richard Rodger Theatre, of the present day York City (through September 8)

"I think self-same few people are completely normal, really, knotty down in their private lives." That's the same of the subversive propositions that Noel Coward made fully convinced to hide in plain sight when he wrote Private Lives, his principally famous work, in 1929. His comedies are as aggressively about nothing as Seinfeld claimed to be. They brim with bubbly banter and abscond from ideas like Polynesian natives from an active volcano. And even now by depicting the crisp affairs of naughty socialites and the infantile antics of lovable upper-class Brits, Coward make overed a sophisticated understanding of the part of masks in life, regard with affection and sexuality. He was, as his biographer John Lahr points gone out "a gay man who passed for a heterosexual matinee idol," and he knew and accepted the actual good reasons people might pick out shallowness and subterfuge as strategies to survive the vicissitudes of existence.

"Laugh at the moralists--flippancy brings revealed the acid in their damned sweetness and light," says Elyot Chase, leading man of Private Lives, a part played by Coward himself when the point out to premiered and performed by Alan Rickman in the Broadway revival. He also says, to his leading lady Amanda Prynne (Lindsay Duncan), "Let's be superficial, and pity the poor philosophers." These lines stand revealed as hilarious antimanifestos. To take them seriously would be to miss the point.

Private Lives isn't about something, it is something--a silky efficient comedy of manners, a minuet in unminced words. After a brief drenched brawl of a marriage and five years of blissful divorce, Elyot and Amanda are onward honeymoon with much less combustible strange spouses when they find themselves in adjoining suites at a inn on the Riviera. Beginning with Amanda and Elyot's outraged discovery of each other's carriage and ending with them running against to Paris together, the first act is as masterful a patch of screwball comedy as anyone has at any time penned. Acts 2 and 3 are a bit more contrived in their conspiracy machinations but still hilarious. Suffice it to say that despite their dedicates to the contrary, these ultramodern lovebirds could no more preserve from quarreling than Lucy Ricardo could restrain from breaking any promise she made to Ricky.

The repartee in Private Lives is in the way that polished that it could practically deliver, laugh at, and applaud itself. Lucidly, in this version, it has help. The occasion for the revival, which originated in London's West fall of the curtain is a reunion of the stars and director of the 1987 Broadway production of Le Liaisons Dangereuses, Christopher Hampton's adaptation of the 18th-century French novel about pair aristocrats who quell their boredom with scheming and seduction. It's thrilling to have actors as subtle wicked, and sexy as Duncan and Rickman tackling Coward. She invests Amanda with a feline power that is glamorous and enigmatic at the same time. He steals the exhibit though. You just can't acquire enough of his mobile mug and scathing understatement. by the agency of all reports straight and happily partnered with a female politician, Rickman nonetheless has the kind of suave, queeny hauteur any Noel Coward manque would kill for.

Shewey writes often for The New York Times.

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