GOD took six days to create the world, then rested on the seventh. Noel Coward famously took only four to create Private Lives, in bed nursing flu in Shanghai on a tour of the Far East in 1930.

"Your play is delightful and there's nothing that can't be fixed," observed his prospective leading lady, Gertrude Lawrence, deliciously feigning indifference at Coward's sculpted comedy of elegant manners and appalling behaviour.

The play is still delightful, and there is indeed nothing that can't be fixed. Even the cost-saving decision to forego a revolve stage that would have facilitated a more graceful changing of sets bears fruit.

If the first half stretches to 90 minutes, it gives welcome momentum to the briefly renewed highs and crashing descent into old habits of sparring partners Elyot Chase and Amanda Prynne. Elyot and Amanda simply dance under a star-lit sky as furniture is moved all around them to transfer the reunited couple from Normandy hotel to Paris flat on a giddy cloud.

In Act One, Elyot and Amanda, played by real-life husband and wife Paul Shelley and Paula Stockbridge, have fallen in love again while honeymooning, quite by chance, in adjoining rooms with their respective new partners, Sibyl (Sarah Miller) and Victor (Kevin McGowan).

As was the case 12 years ago, when the Theatre Royal last staged Private Lives with pantomime villain David Leonard as Elyot, Dawn Allsopp's opening set is a jealousy-inducing breath of French sea air. The Thirties' clothes would delight Noel and Gertie (except for Stockbridge's red evening dress, which makes her look more Emma Thompson than Kristin Scott Thomas).

On the balcony of a marbled Deauville hotel, Elyot and Sibyl are both in elegant white, and in this particular casting the waspish Elyot is indeed "very much older" than his young, cautious wife. That casting is canny: both Elyot and Amanda are older than their new, inexperienced partners, and the age differences in Damian Cruden's cast suit the subsequent spats.

Shelley and Stockbridge savour the devilish humour, yet bring out the inner sadness too, and their pacing of the all-important second scene is a joy too, the final cloud of cushion feathers dancing to the waves of applause.

Coward admitted Sybil and Victor were "little better than ninepins, lightly wooden and only there at all to be repeatedly knocked down and stood up again". Miller and McGowan play these stooges with just the right degree of irritation, amusingly annoying spouses, each other and audience alike.

Box office: 01904 623568

Updated: 09:44 Thursday, October 23, 2003