A note from Private Lives director, Tanuja Amarasuriya
18 Sep 2025
When we announced that I’d be directing Private Lives for this RTST Award production, a producer turned to me and said, “Well, I look forward to seeing what you do with that dusty old museum piece.”
I’d never seen or read Private Lives before the co-producers asked me to consider it for this production. And honestly, before I read it, “dusty old museum piece” was well in the ballpark of what I anticipated. But you know what? It isn’t. It’s a total banger of a play: passionate, bitingly funny, shocking and tender. What surprised me most was how modern these characters felt. Their contradictions, needs, desires, insecurities, are all so recognisable. What do you do when you’re in love with someone who’s bad for you? That’s the question at the heart of the play for me, and it’s a question that’s still very much alive today.
Private Lives brilliantly satirises the toxicity of marriage as a social custom. Noel Coward was writing this as a gay man from a working-class family, at a time when homosexuality was still criminalised, and there was no social safety net. The pressure to conform in order to pass as socially acceptable and get on in the world, would force so many people to deny parts of themselves. I’m always drawn to stories about outsiders and Private Lives deftly observes how its characters perform into or reject social conventions in terms of gender stereotypes, the way they use their intellect, or their behaviour or lifestyle.
Plenty has changed since 1930, but 2025 finds us in a world where tolerance and freedoms we might have recently taken for granted are being rolled back. The constant scrutiny of social media and how it pushes us to perform ourselves, feels akin to the context of social judgment that this play was calling out a century ago. These characters are young people in their twenties and thirties working out how to be free and move forward in a precarious world, navigating social expectations, the rapid progress of technology and of course with all their hormones and unruly desires raging!
I’ve encountered a pervasive preconception about the “proper” way to do a Noël Coward play – that it has to be very stiff and clipped and white. But that’s not at all how Private Lives landed with me when I read it. It’s volatile, sexy, shocking and ridiculously funny. It immediately connected with me and my modern experience – which is certainly not stiff or clipped or white. So while our production will keep the story set in the 1930s with the fabulous glamour and screwball comedy thrill of that era, we’ve also got a brilliant multi-racial cast, we won’t be using heightened RP, and we’ll acknowledge the queerness that’s written into the play.
If you didn’t think this play was for you, I hope our production will change your mind.
Tanuja Amarasuriya, August 2025
