Noël Coward was responsible, said Kenneth Tynan, "for taking the fat off English comic dialogue". David Freeman is an opera director known for taking the clothes off singers; and here he transforms Coward's comedy into something devilishly sexy and rampantly operatic.
Duncan Hayler's art-deco set features an astonishing self-clearing floor, which lifts and tilts to dump furniture, actors and props into the orchestra pit. It's a grandiose metaphor for characters poised on the edge of an abyss. Yet it doesn't upstage Freeman's most innovative stroke, which is to cast Elyot and Amanda as much older than their infantile behaviour suggests.
Emphasising that the couple have entered their twilight years draws out a morbid, almost metaphysical vein in Coward's writing. Macabre parodies of Marvell suddenly spring to the fore: "Kiss me now," demands Peter Harding's greying Elyot, pawing desperately at Anna Keaveney's heavily painted Amanda, "before your body rots and worms pop out of your eye sockets."
To further emphasise the age gap, Amanda and Elyot have forsaken one another for new spouses young enough to be their grandchildren. Yet, as the hapless Victor and Sibyl, Toby Sawyer and Phillipa Peak have a spectacular concluding spat that demonstrates that they are doomed to repeat the bad example of their elders.
No Private Lives comes without its irritations. Elyot and Amanda's pact to shout "Solocs" when they want to call a truce remains cloyingly unfunny. But Freeman digs beneath the camp glitter to paint an elegiac picture of hungry, sensual animals suddenly faced with the dying of the light.
· Until April 3. Box office: 01332 363275.
