For director Jonathan Kent, Noel Coward’s Private Lives is a series of firsts – his first play by the celebrated comic writer and his first time at Chichester’s Minerva Theatre.

“Coward called Private Lives an intimate play,” says Kent on a break from rehearsals. “What was really attractive about doing it at Chichester was not doing it in the big space, but where the audience was amongst it.

“The play was written as a proscenium arch play, so taking it among the audience highlights areas of the play which might have got lost.”

Recreating Coward’s battle of the sexes are Anna Chancellor and Toby Stephens, who play glamorous, rich and divorced couple Amanda and Elyot, who meet again by accident on their respective honeymoons five years on from their acrimonious separation.

The chance encounter reignites their passions for each other – without a thought for their new partners or their chequered past together.

“I hope we can bring out the visceral nature of their relationship, particularly in the second act,” says Kent. “What I would really be keen to avoid is this received notion of brittle Coward. The actors have got to be able to handle the language; it’s Who’s Afraid Of Virginia Woolf except very funny.”

Another challenge is the violence in the play, as the two leads start to take chunks out of each other.

“Now, rightly, there is a distrust for a man who hits a woman,” says Kent. “We have to find a way so that it doesn’t entirely alienate an audience.”

Kent’s approach to his first Coward has been the same as for any other material – focusing on the characters and relationships within the story.

Character study

“It’s distilled by having fewer people,” says the director, whose last plays at Chichester were the Festival Theatre productions A Month In The Country in 2010 and Sweeney Todd, which transferred to the West End last year.

“It doesn’t matter whether it is Shakespeare or a musical, it is all character-based. You have to create credible and understandable people.

“Coward described his characters as just skittles to be knocked over – we are keen to work through that and give them depth and texture as well. The burden of the play lies with Elyot and Amanda, but their rejected partners have to have a credible depth to them – it’s their tragedy. They are the collateral damage caused by this couple.”

At the centre is the relationship between Chancellor’s Amanda and Stephens’ Elyot.

“I’ve never worked with Anna before, but I have seen and admired her lots of times,” he says. “I saw her last performance at Chichester [in the double-bill South Downs/ The Browning Version] – she has the intense temperament which is useful for the character.

“Toby is a wonderful actor, I have worked with him twice, and this is the sort of part where he can inhabit the language beautifully. It’s not his first time in Chichester–- he used to be a stage hand when he was 18 as his family lived near Petworth!”

Kent’s work has been seen in the West End and at Glyndebourne, where he directed productions of Benjamin Britten’s The Turn Of The Screw in 2007 and Mozart’s Don Giovanni in 2010.

But he is always happy to return to Chichester – and hopes to continue his involvement with the theatre, as he closes its 50th anniversary season.

“I love Chichester – it’s wonderful what Jonathan Church is doing,” he says. “It’s such a mixed bag, but a well-balanced bag of productions.

“As somebody who ran a theatre once, I admire the way Chichester is run. Theatres are not about the buildings, they are about the people working in them. They are a very creative group of people.”

  • Minerva Theatre, Oaklands Park, Chichester, Friday, September 21, to Thursday, October 27. Starts 7.45pm, 7pm on Friday 28, matinees at 2.30pm, tickets from £23.50. For more information, call 01243 781312