Design for Living was Jorge Silva Melo’s final stage production, his enthusiastic return to Noël Coward, after Private Lives. “Ah, how I love Noël Coward. Is he frivolous? Or really deep? He’s quite theatrical, I’m sure.” This play, which premiered on Broadway in 1933 to huge critical acclaim and commercial success, was written in fulfilment of a pact with “the Lunts” (Alfred Lunt and Lynn Fontanne), a well-known couple of American stage actors who were going through difficult times. The trio of leading characters runs through all the variations, beguilements and damages of a ménage à trois, while ascending to success and wealth. Coward describes them in the following terms: “These glib, over-articulate and amoral creatures are like moths in a pool of light, unable to tolerate the lonely outer darkness, and equally unable to share the light without colliding constantly and bruising one another’s wings.” According to Silva Melo, this is “a theatre of dinner jackets, champagne, roses, camellias and heaps of mischief. So much poison, so much wickedness, so much love lost!”