“Private Lives” at Pennsylvania Shakespeare Festival is one of playwright Noel Coward’s paeans to his longtime suspicions about human relationships, that they’re unstable and undependable. The two married, divorced, and remarried couples in this play have said the “I do’s” without considering the consequences: They actually have to LIVE with this other person till death do them part, but additionally they are not supposed to precipitate that death with their own annoying personality traits.Coward’s sophisticated repartee is set against a 1930s lifestyle in which the idle rich have nothing better to do but amble around high-society European watering holes. Though he lived that life himself, he often satirized it in his art and that is what he’s doing in “Private Lives.” Coward’s life was dedicated to the arts as a playwright, actor, composer, singer and director, and his personal style lingers as an archetype among British characters. His subtext emerges as scant confidence in marriage or in relationships at all.
Eleanor Handley and Matthew Floyd Miller are the urbane divorced couple, each now married to someone else, who rediscover why they married each other and then why they divorced each other. While they honeymoon at a fancy French resort, her ex and his new wife, played by Luigi Sottile and Talley Gale, are honeymooning at the same resort. Sparks fly. That’s it. Handley and Miller are adept at capturing the brittle, inward personalities of the lead couple as they thrust and parry their way through the play. Sottile and Gale are softer, somehow, as if they hadn’t been British for terribly long. All do quite well with the upper-class British accent though it is sometimes a bit difficult to translate. A touch of comedy was added by Taylor Congdon’s appearance as a vindictive French maid who speaks French her clients don’t understand. We can only imagine what she is saying.So, all this adds up to – what' Dennis Razze has directed skillfully, Roman Tatarowicz has designed beautiful Art Deco sets, Sarah Cubbage’s costumes are right for the period and all is well. There’s nothing deep going on here; it’s the frosting on the theatre cake, sweet but full of empty calories.“Private Lives,” through Aug. 4, Labuda Center for the Performing Arts, DeSales University, 2755 Station Ave., Center Valley. Tickets: 610-282-9455, www.pashakespeare.org