Very Flat, Norfolk

The greatest 1/3 of a play in the 20th century is Act I of Noël Coward’s Private Lives. 

The scene is adjoining terraces of a high-class hotel in Deauville, France, where, unbeknownst to each other, a divorced couple have checked in with their new mates. (What would drama be without coincidences?) Elyot and Amanda, the divorcees, were originally played by Coward and Gertrude Lawrence. In the Youtube link below, the actors are Alec McCowen and Penelope Keith.

“Very flat, Norfolk.”

The most famous line in the play is spoken by Amanda. The inflection is as flat as the Norfolk landscape itself. However, the whole power of the play is in those three words—power that is belied by the flatness of the utterance. Amanda—and Elyot—underneath their cool, unemotional dialogue—are burning with passion for each other. 

Their divorce five years before freed them from having to try living with each other, but we see that it hasn’t freed them from their sexual attraction for each other. And at the end of the act, they give in to the fire burning inside them and run off to Paris, leaving their new spouses behind.  

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The joke goes: There are two kinds of people in the world—those who divide people into two categories and those who don’t. 

KCM belonged to the group who doesn’t understand how divorced persons could re-unite for sex. “But they’re divorced,” she once proclaimed. “They separated. They can’t have those feelings for each other!” She obviously would not understand Private Lives. 

What she did understand was this: A friend of hers who was about to get married announced that she was going to have one last sexual fling before getting hitched. No alarms bells went off when KCM heard this. Quite the opposite, as she saw nothing strange about it.

I, on the other hand, was quite taken aback to hear about the friend’s intention. I, who completely understand the fact that passion (i.e., sexual attraction) does not disappear concurrently with the appearance of a court decree, cannot fathom a situation like this—how someone who has declared her love, her desire to be joined to another for life, can blithely go to bed with a different person. But I fully understand Amanda and Elyot.

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So, in compliance with the old joke, I have here divided the world into two categories of people: the KCM people and the HG people. 

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I started this post by praising Act I of Private Lives. The play consists of two more acts, in which we see Amanda and Elyot struggle to actually live together—which, of course, they hadn’t been able to do five years before. The two acts complete a raucous comedy, a first-rate comedy, to be fair. But Act I, standing alone, offers something deeper than comedy—insight into the irrational power of passion, which can surprisingly erupt, as if there was a volcano underneath the flat landscape of Norfolk.