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

Coward Plays #2

by Noël Coward

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

The volume containshis best-loved classic, Private Lives, which was an immeditate hit whenit was first staged in 1930. Coward's sparkling dialogue and reparteehave ensured the play's popularity ever since. Of Bitter-Sweet in 1929 Noël Coward wrote that it was "a musical that gaveme more complete satisfaction than anything else I had yet written. Notespecially on acount of its dialogue or its lyrics or its music or itsproduction but as a whole." The Marquise is an "eighteenth centurycomedy" filled with maids and duels, whilst Post-Mortem is avilification of war that contains some of Coward's most powerfulwriting.

Genres: Plays, Drama, 20th Century, Theatre

316 pages, Paperback

First published January 1, 1932

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

[Boo]

Private Lives 4 ⭐️
Bitter Sweet 1⭐️

[John Jr. · Rating 4 out of 5]

Some astute observers claim to have detected a slight insufficiency of plot in Private Lives. Nonsense. Noël Coward’s finest comedy presents some of the most fundamental forms of struggle in human life: those involving relationships and affairs of the heart. It’s a battle of the sexes fought out within the arena of upper-class propriety, and the delightful thing is that, apart from a few tactical shifts of place and alliance, and an episode of shouting and throwing and tussling on the floor, everything is conducted with the most elegant and ethereal of weapons, words. Talk is certainly a form of action, and action is what plot consists of, and there you have it.

The play is about Elyot and Amanda, who keep company with Beatrice and Benedick (of Much Ado About Nothing) and Mirabell and Miramant (of The Way of the World) in the league of brilliant and finicky lovers. Elyot and Amanda had been married to each other a few years ago, but they found that wouldn’t do. Now they’re married to two others—Do they need to be named? They do not—and are on honeymoon in adjoining rooms of the same French hotel. To mention a few particulars without giving away too much to those who have somehow failed to meet these two yet, Elyot and Amanda find they can’t stand to be apart and run away to Paris, where they find they can’t stand to be together. Next, their abandoned spouses track them down, and we have the setup for Act III, into which I will not venture.

It’s one of those plays that could be called a comedy of bad manners. But that’s what many comedies of manners are, I suppose; it’s a form in which convention comes into conflict with desire. During rehearsals in 1930 for its first production, the Lord Chamberlain decided that the whole second act risked offending public standards of morality. (He could’ve banned the play; fortunately, Coward persuaded him to change his mind.) The Lord Chamberlain might as well have objected that people don’t do such things, as Brack does just after Hedda does…you know what. That two of Coward’s characters violate a standard was rather the point, and part of the fun.

Private Lives is the only play I intended to read in this volume, thinking I might find an idea to steal. So I skipped the operetta Bitter-Sweet, source of “I’ll See You Again” and other still-familiar songs (which I’m sure are better heard than read), and after glancing into The Marquise, Coward’s attempt at an 18th-century comedy, I decided it was too brittle. But Sheridan Morley’s introduction persuaded me to run through Post-Mortem. Written in 1930, shortly after Private Lives, it resulted from Coward’s encounter with R. C. Sherriff’s World War I drama, Journey’s End, in which Coward performed for a short spell. There’s a lesson in Post-Mortem, which is that authors shouldn’t always take up a subject about which they care deeply—that is, if you don’t know how to write it, it doesn’t matter whether you want to or not. I agree with Morley’s description of the play: “a strange, angry and very uncharacteristic Coward polemic.” It’s not so much a reaction to that terrible war as a reaction to the reactions to it; as Morley says, it’s “about the betrayed promises and false illusions of the Twenties.” Worth reading as a curio.

[Bob · Rating 4 out of 5]

The second collection of Coward plays starts off with a bang with "Private Lives" from 1930, one of his more famous works. Slightly reminiscent of 1952's "Quadrille" (as well as others) given it's "permutations of lovers" schtick, but far better and funnier. Two newly married couples on their honeymoon have their bliss interrupted by the fact that the man from one union is the ex spouse of the woman in the other. This one had countless stagings and a couple movies, including a pretty good one featuring Norma Shearer and Robert Montgomery.

"Private Lives" is followed here by "Bitter-Sweet", an operetta concerning an engaged woman who inspired by the reminiscing of an older woman to break off her engagement so as to pursue a young pour musician. The time-jumping here didn't work for me here and felt this one was a bit of a slog.

"The Marquise" gets the collection back on the rails with a tale of an arranged marriage torpedoed by the surprise arrival of a woman from both of the fathers' pasts. One can see the reveals coming a mile away, and the Paris 1735 setting doesn't come through effectively in a reading alone, but it's otherwise brisk and fun enough.

"Post-Mortem" closes the collection. While the play didn't end for me as well as it started, it is a very interesting break from the clever froth that Coward is most known for. Of the Coward plays I've read thus far, this one, concerning a WWI solider who is killed on the frontline and then for some reason enabled to years later visit his mother, girlfriend and fellow soldier as a ghost of sorts, is the one I'd be most interested in seeing actually staged (alongside "Shadow Play"). It's a piece with a strong, angry point of view around the intersection of war, society and religion, that is... maybe unfortunately?... as valid in 2024 as it was in 1930.

[Paul LaFontaine · Rating 2 out of 5]

In Private Lives, a divorced couple who have both remarried accidentally honeymoon simultaneously at the some hotel, and the conflict begins.

I really enjoy Coward's writing and use of language, and this situation was smartly conceived and could have been very funny. Instead Coward took it down the route of the peculiarly British enjoyment of people acidly attacking each other with hissing barbs and verbal harangues. In the end everyone is simply yelling at each other. Wasted opportunity I think.

Can't recommend.

[Samuel · Rating 4 out of 5]

Well, Private Lives is obviously excellent and makes very entertaining reading on a rainy afternoon. The other three in this volume are slightly drab. Bitter-Sweet, I skipped because I wouldn't know how any of the songs went. The Marquise was amusing yet it seemed like Coward was just trying to broaden his horizons. And Post-Mortem was, well, dreary.