Private Lives

**Jorge Silva Melo** and Artistas Unidos offer us an unexpected view of the sophisticated and brilliant **Noël Coward** (1899-1973), one of the most successful playwrights in the Anglo-Saxon world during the 1920s and 1930s. Afterwards, the British author’s work fell into neglect, but it was later “revived” (as a tribute, Harold Pinter staged one of Coward’s plays at the National Theatre in 1976) and remains defiantly old-fashioned today. ** Private Lives ** (1930) is one of those plays to which we associate a series of adjectives and accomplishments. Let us see: written in just three days, it was his most impressive critical and box-office hit, the most eloquent instance of his art. The play is about the sparkle and opaqueness of language, the joys and evils of marriage and divorce, couples that are never happy be they together or apart, and the lights that go out when the champagne runs out. Coward’s epic lightness must never be mistaken for thoughtlessness: his frivolity is disturbing. Philip Hoare, one of his biographers, pointed out that “[f]or all his comic brilliance, Coward may have been one of the greatest tragedians of his time”. Private Lives , he tells us, is a “dark amusement” that “make[s] us laugh so much we forget to cry.”