Coward Plays: 2

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.