Private Lives

Private Lives is a 1930 comedy play written by Noel Coward. It covers a divorced couple, Elyot and Amanda, who inadvertently visit the same hotel in adjacent rooms for their respective honeymoons with new spouses. Despite a tumultuous past, they discover that they still love each other. Britain, where the play was first introduced, almost censored sections of the play for its graphic references to sex. The play was quickly made into a film (1931) and was adapted for multiple other media. The play is a commentary on the naive idealism of marriage and the insufficiency of the model of marriage to facilitate healthy and enduring relationships.

The first act of Private Lives begins in the hotel in Deauville. Elyot and Sibyl, who are on the first day of their honeymoon, are introduced. Elyot muses aloud about some unresolved inner conflict regarding his previous marriage. Sibyl, the more innocent of the two, who loves the idea of being married and is rather ignorant of immediate experience, reminds Elyot how much he loved his previous wife. Unreasonably confident that the breakup was due to a fault of his ex-wife, not him, she makes several derogatory assumptions about the woman. Declaring that she knows how to make a husband happy, Elyot becomes anxious, anticipating she will try to manage his life.

In the adjoining room, Victor and Amanda—Elyot’s ex-wife—are also starting a new marital life. Victor cannot get his mind off of the cruelty he believes Elyot once showed Amanda before they divorced. It is revealed that they divorced five years earlier after a turbulent three-year marriage. Victor quickly reveals himself to be the naive male version of Sibyl, harboring similar assumptions and aspirational models for what their marriage must be. He declares that he will take care of Amanda so that she forgets completely about her ex-husband. Amanda grows anxious, inferring that Victor will try to manage her identity.



Soon, the former husband and wife discover each other’s presence on the terrace that connects their rooms. They each plead with their new spouses to depart the hotel at once, but their spouses are uncooperative, both angrily leaving to eat dinner alone. Elyot and Amanda speak to each other, their spouses’ stubbornness giving them an excuse to convene, and realize they are still in love and mutually regret the divorce. They end up in each other’s arms and then, flee the hotel without telling their spouses, going off to Amanda’s apartment in Paris.

Act 2 begins in Amanda’s Paris flat a few days after the botched honeymoons. Elyot and Amanda have developed a code phrase, “Solomon Isaacs,” which they abbreviate “Sollocks,” to cue when to stop an argument that is getting out of control, forcing them to become silent for two minutes. They make out, impassioned, but soon their infatuation dissolves, and they realize they divorced in the first place because they can neither live with nor without each other. They start physical and verbal altercations and try to outsmart each other in vain, repeating the same flaws they pointed out in their past marriage. Their altercation grows worse: Amanda smashes a vinyl record over Elyot’s head, and Elyot slaps her in the face. They continue to escalate the vicious cycle, consumed by their problems. At the crux of the fight, Sibyl and Victor walk in.

Act 3 takes place the next morning. Amanda, attempting to abscond from the flat, is shocked to find Sibyl and Victor there. They converse, and Elyot comes in, with whom Amanda immediately resumes the fight. The new spouses declare that they will not grant marriage annulments to the former couple until after the first year, a challenge posed to see whether Amanda and Elyot can really survive together. As the conversation escalates to anger, Sibyl and Victor also begin fighting, trying to defend their spouses. Amanda and Elyot decide that Sibyl and Victor are equally not suited for a relationship with each other. As they covertly escape the scene, Victory and Sibyl grow violent, recreating the same destructive pattern that plagued Elyot and Amanda for years.



Elyot and Amanda, the principal characters of the play, are, ironically, consumed and distracted by their wealth and relative freedom, constantly trying to live with the models and fads that contemporary society prescribes for them. Their indulgence in worldly things and overly fashionable demeanors work counterintuitively to highlight their absurdity and estrangement from other humans, most notably from each other. Sibyl and Victor ultimately replicate these contagious social ills, none of the characters having learned tolerance or the absurd asymmetries of the social conditions underlying their relationships. Despite the ostensibly infinite permutations of marriages that exist, Coward suggests that there are very few narrative skeletons that underpin our human relationships.