Plays 5: Relative Values / Look After Lulu / Waiting In The Wings / Suite In Three Keys

Coward Plays #5

by Noël Coward

Containing Coward's best work from the last two decades of his life, this volume includes Relative Values, which ran for over a year in 1951-2, Look After Lulu (1959), his perennially popular Feydeau adaptation, Waiting in the Wings (1960), a bravura piece set in a home for retired actresses, and Suite in Three Keys (1965), a trilogy of plays which gave Coward his last roles on stage. The volume is introduced by Sheridan Morley, Coward's first biographer, and includes an extensive chronology of Coward's work.

Genres: Plays, Drama

566 pages, Paperback

First published January 1, 1982

About the author

Sir Noël Peirce Coward was an English actor, playwright, and composer of popular music. Among his achievements, he received an Academy Certificate of Merit at the 1943 Academy Awards for "outstanding production achievement for In Which We Serve."

Known for his wit, flamboyance, and personal style, his plays and songs achieved new popularity in the 1960s and 1970s, and his work and style continue to influence popular culture. The former Albery Theatre (originally the New Theatre) in London was renamed the Noël Coward Theatre in his honour in 2006.

Reviews

[Keith Jones · Rating 5 out of 5]

Waiting in the Wings is very, very bitter-sweet. It's just about equal parts sad and funny. Relative Values and Look After Lulu are both very funny. Suite in Three Keys is very seriously dramatically depressing.

[Lyle]

Relative Values - 2.8/5
Look After Lulu - 3.8/5
Waiting in the Wings - 5/5
Suite in Three Keys - 4.5/5

[Bob · Rating 2 out of 5]

In general, this period of Coward's output (50s/60s) is my least favorite. "Relative Values" is mildly amusing, but the "the aristocrat's sister-in-law-to-be is his mother's-long-time-maid" is hard to truly enjoy if you've already had a steady diet of this Hugh Grant-y kind of thing growing up. And if you don't have time for that, you certainly won't have time for "Look After Lulu", where there's a lot of people busting into rooms, other people hiding under beds, and other things flying out the window. "Waiting in the Wings" finds Coward in another mode that is simply not why I read him: old (in every sense of the word) Hollywood navel-gazing. The collection comes to a close perhaps on its strongest note, the three-play "Suite in Three Keys", which Coward once snarkily observed as the under-recognized predecessor to Neil Simon's "Plaza Suite" with its "three stories in one hotel" shtick. The suit opens with "A Song at Twilight" which is, finally, Coward at his best, not only with razor-laced ping-pong dialogue but also a truly moving look at an esteemed author and the fallout from his attempts at hiding his homosexuality during an era in which it was not only not tolerated but potentially prosecuted. "Shadows of the Evening" continues the suite with a strong idea (a terminally ill man's current wife enlists his ex-wife to inform him of his condition), but the execution feels a little ho-hum. The closing piece of the suite, "Come Into the Garden Maud" is the least cooked of the three, in which an american man plots his escape from his domineering wife via the attentions of the widow of an italian prince. Like a lot of this entire collection, too much of it comes across as mere caricature, versus the depth that Coward was capable of earlier on in his career.