Love and war There’s still life in Private Lives BY CAROLYN CLAY
	Private Lives By Noël Coward. Directed by Scott Edmiston. Set by Janie E. Howland. Lighting by Karen Perlow. Costumes by Gail Astrid Buckley. With Barlow Adamson, Amy B. Corral, Mandy Fox, Michael Hammond, and Paula Plum. At the Lyric Stage Company of Boston through January 31.

As Elyot says of women in Private Lives, certain plays should be struck regularly, like gongs, and the Lyric Stage Company of Boston is drawing a reverberating sound from Noël Coward’s irresistible 1930 comedy about a divorced pair who abandon the ship of new marriages to steal away on their old leaky love boat. A frisky septuagenarian, the play has survived everything from high-school thespians to Richard Burton and Elizabeth Taylor, who essayed it on Broadway (including a Boston tryout) in 1983. More recently, a British revival that starred Alan Rickman and Lindsay Duncan won a 2002 Tony for Best Revival. At the Lyric, where Coward was once a perennial, Scott Edmiston fields a formidable twosome in beloved local diva Paula Plum and Shakespeare & Company’s Michael Hammond. If they don’t capture the ache attributed to Rickman and Duncan, they do have smug, stylish fun with Coward’s pugilistic Beatrice and Benedick of the champagne-cocktail crowd.

The set-up couldn’t be more symmetrical. Elyot and Amanda, five years divorced, find themselves honeymooning in adjacent hotel suites in the south of France. Having adored and nearly killed each other, they are hoping to find "undramatic" love this time out, he with the pretty, simpy Sybil, she with stuffy, stiff-upper-lipped Victor. An old love song floating up to their adjoining balconies — "Strange how potent cheap music is" — turns them nostalgic, and that’s before they’ve even discovered each other. After matched attempts to escape with the proper stranger, they surrender to old, pyrotechnical attraction. The second act finds the ignitable twosome nesting in Paris before going after each other like fighting cocks; in the third, they try to sort things out with the appalled Victor and Sybil.

So why has this piffle proved as indestructible as fiberglass? The trick is that Elyot and Amanda — flamboyant, eccentric, utterly irresponsible child egotists — are nonetheless lovable, and not just by each other. Extreme they are (thwarted by Sybil, a tuxedo’d Elyot expresses his desire to cut her head off with a meat ax), and devoted to flippancy. But watching the two self-centered lovebirds cavort is like ogling articulate, blinkered babes in a bygone wood.

Which brings us to the pull of the play’s glamorous era, when, at least for some, a life of well-dressed leisure amid splendid scenery (albeit, in the case of Elyot and Amanda, bogged down by boring new spouses) was an option. How about just motoring from your grand hotel at Deauville to your flat in Paris, there to plan a trip to see the temples of India, without even thinking of your 401K? Sure it’s an indolent, fatuous life, but think of all the time to bill, coo, spat, and cook up delicious bons mots.

Last spring, Edmiston, abetted by "designing women" Janie E. Howland (sets), Gail Astrid Buckley (costumes), and Karen Perlow (lighting), helmed an elegant Nora Theatre staging of Harold Pinter’s Betrayal. Here the stylishness is underlined by comic exaggeration, but it’s there, whether in Amanda’s boldly red, brown, and gold Moorish flat or in the fluffy pink evening wear that makes Mandy Fox’s Sybil look like an hourglass of cotton candy. Moreover, Edmiston brings to the Cowardly proceedings both subtext and a touch of Marx Brothers madcap. Early on, the pent-up aggression of the newly reunited Elyot and Amanda goes into the savage dragging and snuffing of cigarettes. Once things have degenerated to the physical, Hammond’s debonair Elyot crawls doggie-style across the floor to retrieve a croissant with his mouth. And the couple’s big dust-up, which ends with them whacking each other with lingerie pulled from an open suitcase, resembles a middle-school locker-room towel fight.

Hammond and Plum try for the tenderness beneath the brittle exteriors of Elyot and Amanda, each waxing soulful at the intrusion of the "cheap music." But it’s more a gesture than a plumbing of depths Coward doesn’t pretend to perform. Still, she, looking like Maggie Smith in a red-bob wig, brings giddy acidity to Amanda. And he, casually dashing, explosive, and a tad melancholic, makes the most of Elyot’s ejaculations, including my favorite: "Don’t quibble, Sybil!" Barlow Adamson is a square-shouldered Victor and particularly effective in a Hume Cronyn–worthy red-faced blow-up toward the end. And newcomer Fox does not shy from Sybil’s iron-froth insipidness or her third-act breakdown, where she gives in to a hilarious, vibrating hysteria that turns her into a sort of kewpie tree-in-the-wind.

You could probably do more important things with your time — say, campaign against domestic violence among the idle rich — than enjoy Private Lives again. But, hey, it’s an alleged classic, so it doesn’t even have to be a guilty pleasure.