Enter couple through hall door. He throws her on the couch and starts kissing her, fervently.

He: Oh darling!

She: Darling?

He: Oh! Darling! How I adore you.

She: Darling, not now darling.

He: Darling? But you adore lovemaking.

She: Oh darling, never so soon after bad theatre.

He: But sweetness, it wasn't bad theatre, it was simply bland theatre.

She: Oh, don't be so tedious darling. I've got a headache.

He: It must be this awful weather. It looks bright and sunny for a moment and then it's worse than you could possibly have imagined moments before.

She: That sounds like the theatre.

He: Oh don't be sarcastic darling. You know it doesn't suit you. Everybody around us seemed to enjoy it.

They gave it a marvellous applause at the end.

She: If everybody around you was jumping off a cliff, would you? Oh God, now you've got me resorting to cliche. How perfectly tedious.

He: For someone so sarcastic, I'd have thought you'd have liked the play. Everybody in it was very flippant.

She: Has it never struck you that flippancy may cover up a very real embarrassment?

He: I don't know what you're talking about, darling.

She: That under their incessant, inane joking there might not be some depths, some vulnerability, even some critique of their society and their time?

He: Critique? But this is Noel Coward. These were the Bright Young Things.

She: And the Bright Young Things burned out.

He: You're always looking for depth. It's so boring, darling. I thought there was some nice dancing to that swing music.

She: Strange how potent cheap music is.

He: I don't understand you, darling.

She: You didn't understand the play, my love.

He: I thought it suited the Gate, all those nice costumes and the pretty backgrounds. I don't know why it irked you so. It's so boring, sweetness, how seriously you take these things. It was just two hours of gentle comedy.

She: Two hours and just two good scenes. That one where Stephen Brennan was playing piano and Paris Jefferson was singing. I think they were both concentrating on the music and forgot about trying to pretend to be in some awful English comedy for a moment. And that last scene between Simon O'Gorman and Katie Kirby where they had a big fight. That was good. He was honest, that actor.

He: Oh darling, you're so dull when you talk about honesty in actors. I thought that chap Brennan was good fun, making all those silly faces.

She: He was a ham. That young maid, though, she brought an irreverent comic energy into it for the brief time she was on stage.

He: My prettiness, it's so like you to single out the smallest role for praise. At least it was well put together by that fellow Stanford. He knows what he's doing.

She: He does. He tells them to learn their lines, and where to stand.

He: Alright loveliness, I concede. You know more about theatre than I do.

She: At last. I can feel the weight lifting from my brow.

Kiss me, darling.

He: Oh darling.

[They kiss. ] He: Darling, those things you said that confused me . . .

were they lines from the play?

She: Yes darling.

He: You're so pretentious, darling.

Exeunt to bedroom.

Colin Murphy 'Private Lives' is at the Gate Theatre until 19 October