A tall, broad-shouldered man walks out onto the terrace of a hotel in the southern France city of Deauville during the midhours of a mild Mediterranean evening. A cream suit-coat cloaks his arms and a folded teal kerchief is tucked in his breast pocket. Around his neck, a matching silk scarf hangs loosely in a billowed knot. He looks off the terrace and over the iron balustrade, as if unaware of the svelte arm his young bride has hung around his own.

“Not so bad,” he says plainly.

Of course, that seemingly throwaway observation is a line of considerable gravity, cloaking the tumult he suspects will come, having done this all before, all this business called marriage, adorned like the suit-coat that dresses his shoulders.

His name is Elyot, the male lead of “Private Lives,” the late Noel Coward’s depression-era, three-act comedy about the devilishly well-mannered romance of the British well-to-do.

The Guthrie Theater is winding down the final month of summer with a production of “Private Lives,” which first came to the United States in 1931, a year after it debuted in Britain. As expected of the Guthrie, the production remains wholly faithful to the notes and dialogue Coward put into the text, a light, loose-lipped comedy that lends itself magnificently to the Mississippi’s powdery limestone banks along Stone Arch, sprawling beneath the theater’s “Endless Bridge.”

The suspicion in Elyot’s voice, which Guthrie veteran Stephen Pelinski projects with admirably ostentatious gusto, arrives thanks to his less than admirable marriage to his first wife, Amanda.

Without wasting a breath, Coward’s script mixes the two exes as those ever-crossing stars pit them at the same resort, five years after their divorce, on their honeymoons with their respective brides and grooms, Sibyl (a primly blonde Tracy Maloney) and Victor (Kris L. Nelson, mawkishly dandy).

Veanne Cox’s Amanda, Elyot’s ex with which he shares the mutual disdain of the other, could not have imagined a lither and more smoldering seductress when writing the script with his good friend and stage-mate, Gertrude Laurence, in mind.

In a late scene following a fight with Elyot, Cox stares into middle distance with a cup of coffee cradled in her fingertips. She darts a glance at Elyot, who sits on a plush armchair opposite her. The look at once communicates “I wouldn’t mind throwing this coffee in your face” and “but I still somehow love you” with little more than a subtly lifted brow and surreptitious nod.

The time between Elyot’s first line and Amanda’s reappraisal of her ex is filled with a vignette into the love they must have once shared and the rapid deterioration that it went through. After the chance encounter at the hotel resparks their love, the couple escapes their better halves and steals away to Amanda’s flat in Paris.

“This is sheer raving madness,” Amanda says of their abrupt decision to leave. “Something’s happened to us; we’re not sane.”

Elyot looks confidently at her and says simply with a smile, “We never were,” before the two scamper up a bisecting trellis and away from Victor and Sibyl. No decision, however hurried, is made without that moment of reflective doubt, and not one of those moments is left without a rueful quip to tip the bad faith on its head.

The opening scene’s set design flatly renders the play’s preoccupation with pairs and symmetry – on either side of the trellis, a porch table and two chairs can be found, as well as a French flag just poking into the scene. The resort’s façade is itself split into two rooms, a draped window and doorway for each, that come so far down stage that they seem ready to spill off the proscenium and into the seating.

By contrast, Amanda’s flat is carved deeply into two tiers accessed to the left and right by a small stair. Alcoves to the kitchen and presumably a second salon flank the extremes, and slightly upstage are two bedrooms in which Amanda and Elyot will lock themselves when their relationship inevitably clashes a second time. The entire set is encased in tall painted walls and woodwork the color of burnt tangerine peels, striking and decidedly noblesse. An elevator is tucked upstage and in the corner, and from a floor-to-ceiling window to its right that looks out over Montmartre, the Sacré-Cúur is rendered in the distance, ethereal in both late night and early morning glows.

For an end of the summer evening at the Guthrie, “Private Lives” couldn’t fare better. A comedy of manners par excellence from the pen of a master craftsman, lightly occupying the river bank like a couple of still-buzzing newlyweds. Not so bad. Not so bad at all.