SOMETIMES the simplest answers are the best.

"I got asked the other day why we were doing Private Lives, and I said... 'Because it's a good play'," says artistic director Damian Cruden, whose revival of Noel Coward's 1930 comedy of elegant manners and appalling behaviour opens at York Theatre Royal on October 18.

Further reasons then start to stack up. "It's been a heavy year, what with the war in Iraq, and there's a lot to be said for people just going out for a night of comedy, watching a play with some incredibly funny lines.

"I also think that working in this industry we can forget that we have a duty to put on classic plays as part of a season. Private Lives was last done here 12 years ago - when David Leonard was in the cast - and there will be some people who have never seen it, and others who will want to see it again because they love the play. People come back to the Theatre Royal pantomime year after year and no one says 'Sorry, you can't do that'."

Then there are matters of topicality, and the ever-growing interest in how the other half misbehaves.

"Bright Young Things Stephen Fry's screen version of Evelyn Waugh's Vile Bodies has just opened, hasn't it, and as in Waugh's story and Private Lives there will always be people with more money than sense and manners, and that jet-setting class will continue to exist and find it difficult to engage with the real world or try to avoid it."

On the surface, Private Lives is an upper-class comedy, written for the upper-class London audience of its time with its dinner-jacketed tale of divorced couple Elyot and Amanda locking limbs then horns when re-united by chance in adjoining honeymoon suites.

"These are people whose lives are more troubled than it would appear at first," says Damian. "Then it's also a battle-of-the-sexes play and we all love battles between the sexes, where we try to understand why it's impossible for couples to live with each other and yet they can't live without each other.

"On top of all that it's a cracking play, very sexy and very lush, with some fantastic characters. Coward must have written 50 plays, and Private Lives is right up there in the top five, if not in the top two."

Damian describes Coward's work of matador wit as a joy to direct.

"It's beautifully structured with characters that are so well drawn, and I'm having fun with a really good company of actors. When the cast is as good as this one it does allow you to go that little bit further and have a deeper relationship with the play," he says.

The sparks are flying, and everyone in the Walmgate rehearsal studios is enjoying the battle of the sexes, not least real-life husband and wife Paul Shelley and Paula Stockbridge in the roles of incorrigible, warring Elyot and Amanda.

"The women are as strong as the men in this 1930s play; they are not male dominated," says Damian. "You wish male writers today were writing parts for women as strong as Amanda."

Private Lives will run at York Theatre Royal from October 18 to November 8. Tickets cost £6.50 to £17, with seats for students and under 25s at £3.50, on 01904 623568.

Updated: 12:56 Friday, October 10, 2003