Coward Plays: 2: Private Lives; Bitter-Sweet; The Marquise; Post-Mortem

· A&C Black
Ebook
320
Pages

About this ebook

The plays in this volume demonstrate the extraordinary skill and
versatility Coward's writing achieved in the late 1920s.




The volume contains
his best-loved classic, Private Lives, which was an immeditate hit when
it was first staged in 1930. Coward's sparkling dialogue and repartee
have ensured the play's popularity ever since. Of Bitter-Sweet in 1929 Noël Coward wrote that it was "a musical that gave
me more complete satisfaction than anything else I had yet written. Not
especially on acount of its dialogue or its lyrics or its music or its
production but as a whole." The Marquise is an "eighteenth century
comedy" filled with maids and duels, whilst Post-Mortem is a
vilification of war that contains some of Coward's most powerful
writing.

About the author

Noël Coward was born in 1899 in Teddington, Middlesex. He made his name as a playwright with The Vortex (1924), in which he also appeared. His numerous other successful plays included Fallen Angels (1925), Hay Fever (1925), Private Lives (1933), Design for Living (1933) and Blithe Spirit (1941). During the war he wrote screenplays such as Brief Encounter (1944) and In Which We Serve (1942). In the fifties he began a new career as a cabaret entertainer. He published volumes of verse and a novel (Pomp and Circumstance, 1960), two volumes of autobiography and four volumes of short stories: To Step Aside (1939), Star Quality (1951), Pretty Polly Barlow (1964) and Bon Voyage (1967). He was knighted in 1970 and died three years later in Jamaica.

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