Theatre Review: This Private Lives was dead on arrival

The Donmar’s production – with Stephen Mangan and Rachael Stirling playing the divorced couple who find themselves honeymooning with their new partners at the same hotel – was a blackly comic affair that communicated, with a little deft rewriting and some superb acting, how love and hatred can be all but interchangeable in the most intense relationships.

If Longhurst’s production made me aware of how relevant Coward’s play still is, Luscombe’s made me see it as a quaint old chocolate box of a show with Nigel Havers and Patricia Hodge making it all seem much too sedate, comfortable and arthritic. Coward’s great lines still shine through, but there is little if any chemistry between the two principals, and, perhaps inevitably, no sense of the raw animal attraction between them that makes it possible for audiences to understand why, despite everything, they can’t live without each other.

If I’d seen this creaky old production at the end of Bournemouth Pier, I’d no doubt not have felt quite so short-changed, but in the West End it is simply not good enough. Coward must almost certainly be turning in his grave at how Luscombe has made his greatest ever play feel every bit as flat as Norfolk.