Private Lives - Background

Background

Coward was in the middle of an extensive Asian tour when he contracted influenza in Shanghai. He spent the better part of his two-week convalescence sketching out the play and then completed the actual writing of the piece in only four days. He immediately cabled Gertrude Lawrence in New York to ask her to keep autumn 1930 free to appear in the play. After spending a few more weeks revising it, he typed the final draft in the Peninsula Hotel in Kowloon and sent copies to Lawrence and his producer and manager, John C. Wilson, with instructions to cable him with their reactions.

Coward received no fewer than thirty telegrams from Lawrence about the play. Her first said that she had read the play and there was "nothing wrong with it that can't be fixed." Coward "wired back curtly that the only thing that was going to be fixed was her performance." Lawrence was indecisive about what to do about her previous commitment to André Charlot. Coward finally responded that he planned to cast the play with another actress. By the time he returned to London, he found Lawrence not only had cleared her schedule but was staying at Edward Molyneux's villa in Cap-d'Ail in southeastern France learning her lines. Coward joined her, and the two began rehearsing the scenes they shared. At the end of July they returned to London where Coward began to direct the production. Coward played the part of Elyot Chase himself, Adrianne Allen was his bride Sybil, Lawrence played Amanda Prynne, and Laurence Olivier was her new husband Victor. Coward wrote Sybil and Victor as minor characters, "extra puppets, lightly wooden ninepins, only to be repeatedly knocked down and stood up again". He later insisted, however, that they must be credible new spouses for the lead characters: "We've got to have two people as attractive as Larry and Adrianne were in the first place, if we can find them."

Rehearsals were still under way when the Lord Chamberlain took exception to the second act love scene, labelling it too risqué in light of the fact the characters were divorced and married to others. Coward went to St. James's Palace to plead his case by acting out the play himself and assuring the censor that with artful direction the scene would be presented in a dignified and unobjectionable manner. Coward repeats one of his signature theatrical devices at the end of the play, where the main characters tiptoe out as the curtain falls – a device that he also used in Present Laughter, Hay Fever and Blithe Spirit.

The play contains one of Coward's most popular songs, "Some Day I'll Find You". The Noël Coward Society's website, drawing on performing statistics from the publishers and the Performing Rights Society, ranks it among Coward's ten most performed songs.