PRIVATE LIVES (2008)

Cursedly self-aware and desperately clever, playwright Noel Coward's characters are a feat to pull off (just ask the cast of last season's limp revival of Design for Living). Alan Rickman and Lindsay Duncan make it look terribly easy as Elyot and Amanda, posh ex-spouses whose hearts are ''jagged with sophistication.'' As fate would have it, they turn up in adjoining honeymoon suites, hitched to comfy, comformist new partners. Sparks fly again -- those same flashes that made their first match so electrifyingly miserable. The wickedly funny bickering and bantering never bores, thanks to Coward's curlicue dialogue and the grand cast that gets to unfurl it. Agile as cats, Rickman and Duncan create characters both vicious and adoring. You know they can't stay together, but you'd like to be there for their last jangling row.

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