Toby Stephens and Anna Chancellor demonstrated last year at Chichester that you can discard the clipped Noël Coward diction, sound modern and even classless, and make this intricately patterned piece of laughing wickedness work even better. Now transplanted to West End splendour, Jonathan Kent’s production polishes up still brighter.

It’s not just Coward’s diamond dialogue and the fiery principals that do the trick. In the opening moments, before the rogue lovers have even spotted one another, physical clues doom the two honeymoons. Anna-Louise Plowman’s Sybil lunges affectionately at her suave bridegroom, squashing him against the rail; Anthony Calf as Victor squeezes a reluctant Amanda. In the most physical sense they don’t fit together. Amanda and Elyot do: all through the erotically charged bickering and larking in the second act they flow around one another as fluidly as their silk pyjamas. The sensuality is heightened because Chancellor is taller than Stephens, broad-shouldered: a woman, as Elyot observes, prone to “go banging around”, a modern woman with her own flat, striding around in palazzo-pants.

I had forgotten how good Coward’s gender politics are: the elegant demonstration that while the equally self-confident lovers can’t deal peacefully together, neither could Victor with his heavy male “rugged grandeur” ever really enjoy Sybil’s weedy hysterics and girlish wiles. I found myself reflecting that the runaway pair with their private jokes have a better chance than the traditional “wise, steady, gentle” marriage that Elyot thought he wanted. Of course to a modern eye (and probably many in 1930) the joke is that the Elyot-Amanda marriage might have lasted if either of them had gone to work, or even made their own coffee. If Coward is saying anything serious it is that nobody can be “everything” to anyone else. Sexy, sated idleness is for weekends: not for nothing is it day three when we find them bickering in Paris.

But never mind all that: the joy of Kent’s production is that without self-parody it is head-clutchingly funny, provoking helpless snorts of mirth even with single words. Notably “Brioche”, “Canada!” and “God!”. This last explodes from Elyot on the balcony, when he has sighted Amanda, lush in plain velvet, and turns to see Sybil’s hilariously fussy dinner frock. The costumes do great work: when Amanda shrinks from Victor’s masterfully depressing tweed waistcoat, women over forty shudder. We’ve all been there.

It’s hard to believe that Private Lives (1930) is even older than the Rolling Stones. For while Mick and Keef now seem like a geriatric parody of their former selves this is a comedy that in Jonathan Kent’s superb production feels forever young, fresh and delightful. It’s not always like that of course. In lesser productions Coward’s epigrammatic one-liners can seem tired and mannered, and if there is no coup-de-foudre between the actors playing Elyot and Amanda the play can seem a self-regarding bore. Here however the chemistry proves spectacularly combustible. I didn’t think I would ever see a sexier Private Lives than the one starring Alan Rickman and Lindsay Duncan more than a dozen years ago but the sense of unbuttoned intimacy and desire between Anna Chancellor’s Amanda and Toby Stephens’s Elyot proves even stronger. As Chancellor put it in a Telegraph interview “you think these two must really be at it.”

You sense this from the opening scene when the divorced couple meet on their adjoining balconies at the Deauville hotel where each is spending the first night of their honeymoon with new partners. Amanda asks Elyot for a cigarette. Instead of simply offering her his cigarette case as Coward’s stage direction suggests, he removes the cigarette from his own mouth and gives it to Amanda before lighting a fresh one for himself. You sense at once that this is a couple who know each other through and through and have enjoyed many a post-coital gasper together. But throughout the performances feel fresh-minted. There is a real edge of danger about Stephens’s vulpine Elyot. When he turns on his clingy and insipid new bride Sibyl and hisses “I should like to cut off your head with a meat axe” the stinging venom of his delivery is genuinely shocking. This is a brute who isn’t joking when he announces that “certain women should be struck regularly, like gongs”. Anna Chancellor meanwhile plays Amanda with a sensual, slightly raddled glamour, her wit and bohemian extravagance often seeming like a defence mechanism against the knowledge that she is growing old. For the prospect of age and death haunts the play and its giddy wit is like a raspberry of defiance blown at the grim reaper. Elyot is only half joking when he remarks to Amanda: “Kiss me darling, before your body rots and worms pop in and out of your eye sockets.”

The great central act in which post-coital languor gradually gives way first to irritation, then anger and finally to no-holds-barred domestic violence is staged with virtuosic panache and invention by Kent, and brilliantly played by the two leads. It will be a long time before I forget the sight of Chancellor dancing to Stravinsky’s Rite of Spring to rile her lover into physically incontinent fury.  Coward described the couple’s drearily conventional new spouses, Victor and Sibyl, as little more than ninepins, set up to be knocked down, but Anthony Calf and Anna-Louise Plowman play them with distinction, the one hilariously pompous, the other a ghastly moaning Minnie.

This is a gloriously entertaining evening, opulently designed by Anthony Ward, and offering two hours of comic bliss.