Private Lives, Albery Theatre, London

Another masterly reunion

It is five years, in Private Lives, since Amanda and Elyot have met when they accidentally coincide on those adjacent hotel balconies in Deauville and decide to abscond together from their respective second honeymoons. Howard Davies's lovely, liberating revival of this Coward classic effects another piquant reunion. It is 16 years since Lindsay Duncan and Alan Rickman scorched like ice as those two rather different former lovers, the Vicomte de Valmont and the Marquise de Merteuil, in Christopher Hampton's renowned adaptation of Les Liaisons Dangereuses. Having played a pair of controlled, calculating monsters who treat emotions as a chess-game, they are intriguingly re-teamed now to play a diabolical duo who, faced with a chess set, would be more likely to hurl the pieces at one another.

There was a time when actors felt obliged to imitate the clenched, epicene staccato of the author and his co-star Gertrude Lawrence, but Davies's production continues the trend of releasing the piece from such tyranny and of energising the insight that violent bickering is just another form of sex for Coward's selfish and headstrong couple. It achieves these ends far less laboriously than the recent National Theatre revival which replaced the master's stiletto-point with a cosh. Instead of overdoing the Strindbergian intensity, Rickman's hilariously petty bitch of an Elyot and Duncan's superb, coolly passionate and unhurried Amanda create at times a haunting sense of the loneliness and melancholy that underlie the flippant glamour.

You feel this particularly in the sequence in Amanda's Paris flat where the ditty Davies chooses for them to sing at the piano is Coward's own wistfully reflective signature song which wonders whether "a talent to amuse" is compensation for being essentially on your own: "Hey ho/If love were all/I would be lonely". Rickman and Duncan perform the piece with a beautiful meditative sadness, the more moving because neither of them is remotely the conventional idea of singer. And, as you listen to them, you suddenly get a fresh perception of Amanda and Elyot as the kind of people who have an artistic temperament without the consolations of artistic ability. To be soulmates in such a predicament must be an acutely irritating form of salvation – hence their fractious failure to live successfully together or apart.

The production is an object lesson in how a show can take its time without becoming slack or underpowered. I've often thought that the play's second and third acts, while hugely entertaining, were somehow redundant, since what happens is implied in the perfectly constructed balcony scene. Here, though, Davies and company make you marvel at the middle act's masterly alternations of mood – between the intimacy of post-coital languor to the equivalent intimacy of homicidal violence. It's full of droll touches – like the idea of having Elyot strike a gong to bring to an end one of the frustrating two-minute silences that either of them can impose, by pact, on the other. (It mischievously underlines the fact that this is a man who is prepared to declare that "Women should be struck regularly like gongs".)

In the debris of the morning after, Duncan dispenses breakfast coffee with a maddeningly smiling graciousness as though to distant acquaintances rather than to a cuckolded husband, a partner in adultery and his wife. Absurdly seated between the injured parties on the sofa, Rickman launches excellently timed put-downs through mouthfuls of brioche. Cast to the hilt, the production has Emma Fielding (all fiery-eyed censoriousness) and Adam Godley (all slow-on-the-uptake manly remonstrance) as the jilted spouses who, by the neatly inverted end, are like rabid dogs at one another's throats .

To 6 January (020-7369 1730)