This week, Belfast audiences are privy to the machinations of a thoroughly modern love affair of incendiary proportions, written almost 70 years ago by one of the most elegantly comic writers of this century. Nowadays, Elyot Chase and his former wife Amanda would be fully signed-up members of the chattering classes, travelling the world, hanging out with the jet set, sipping cocktails and freefalling into relationships that can turn violent and ugly as fast as they can ignite into full-blown, blind passion.
As the jaggedly sophisticated Amanda, Juliet Stevenson, huskily enunciates the truth at the heart of so many of Noel Coward's dazzling but sharp-edged comedies - that, deep in our private lives, few people are completely "normal"? It is nothing short of total pleasure to sit back and watch Stevenson at work, striking postures, wafting the sarcastic one-liners through the smoke from her ever-present cigarette, skilfully manipulating the men in her life, dancing like an angel from one self-inflicted drama to the next.
She is beautifully partnered by Anton Lesser, intriguingly cast against type but as stylish, urbane, volatile and attractive as Coward intended Elyot to be.
Dominic Rowan and Rebecca Saire provide unselfish support as the two second choice spouses, whose happy prospects are shattered by a chance encounter on a Deauville hotel balcony, but Philip Franks's cut-glass Royal National Theatre production is dominated by Stevenson and Lesser's virtuoso portrayals of near-fatal marital bliss.
Private Lives is at the Grand Opera House, Belfast until Saturday. To book phone Ticket Shop on Belfast 241919.
