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Easy Virtue: A Play in Three Acts
Leather Binding on Spine and Corners with Golden Leaf Printing on round Spine (extra customization on request like complete leather, Golden Screen printing in Front, Color Leather, Colored book etc.) Reprinted in 2022 with the help of original edition published long back [1926]. This book is printed in black & white, sewing binding for longer life, Printed on high quality Paper, re-sized as per Current standards, professionally processed without changing its contents. As these are old books, we processed each page manually and make them readable but in some cases some pages which are blur or missing or black spots. If it is multi volume set, then it is only single volume, if you wish to order a specific or all the volumes you may contact us. We expect that you will understand our compulsion in these books. We found this book important for the readers who want to know more about our old treasure so we brought it back to the shelves. Hope you will like it and give your comments and suggestions. - English, Pages 300. EXTRA 10 DAYS APART FROM THE NORMAL SHIPPING PERIOD WILL BE REQUIRED FOR LEATHER BOUND BOOKS. COMPLETE LEATHER WILL COST YOU EXTRA US$ 25 APART FROM THE LEATHER BOUND BOOKS. {FOLIO EDITION IS ALSO AVAILABLE.} Complete Easy virtue; a play in three acts, by Noel Coward. 1926 Coward, Noël, -.
296 pages, Hardcover
First published January 1, 1926
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About the author
Noël Coward
430 books218 followersSir 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.
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.
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Displaying 1 - 12 of 12 reviews
March 3, 2020
From TIA:
Dramatisation of one of Coward's lesser known works, and the subject of a very early Hitchcock film.
Larita is a beautiful woman with a past, who has recently married John Whittaker, the eldest son of an upper-middle class family. Her arrival among his family provokes a clash with their sense of propriety, but she fends off their attacks with wit and charm until she loses control - and her husband.
https://archive.org/details/EasyVirtu...
Dramatisation of one of Coward's lesser known works, and the subject of a very early Hitchcock film.
Larita is a beautiful woman with a past, who has recently married John Whittaker, the eldest son of an upper-middle class family. Her arrival among his family provokes a clash with their sense of propriety, but she fends off their attacks with wit and charm until she loses control - and her husband.
https://archive.org/details/EasyVirtu...
April 8, 2022
It is actually 2,5 stars rounded up to 3.
February 20, 2024
Noël Coward blijft me aangenaam verrassen. Ik had hem altijd abusievelijk geassocieerd mét stijlvol maar leeghoofdig entertainment voor de upper class.
Boy, was I wrong. In ‘Easy virtue’ - over trouwen met een snob - wil Coward niet entertainen, maar zijn hartsgrondige afschuw uitschreeuwen tegen de bekrompenheid, de Britse conventies die het leven en de liefde verstikken. Met een scherpe ironie à la Oscar Wilde.
Boy, was I wrong. In ‘Easy virtue’ - over trouwen met een snob - wil Coward niet entertainen, maar zijn hartsgrondige afschuw uitschreeuwen tegen de bekrompenheid, de Britse conventies die het leven en de liefde verstikken. Met een scherpe ironie à la Oscar Wilde.
April 24, 2022
Having seen the movie version of this play, I thought it would be interesting to read the original play. Crikey. The first and most interesting thing is that the movie is far better than the play. The departures from the original are so considerable that only things that are similar to Coward's play are the following:
A butler called Furber, who is a real person in the movie; in the play he has no existence except buttling.
A strikingly good-looking woman who's married the heir in a very uptight family. However she isn't American in the play - and she's some years older than John; they go on about it all the time.
An extremely repressed mother, who doesn't, however, have any concerns about the family property, though she's so uptight about life in general from the moment the curtain rises that she would act as an appetite suppressant to anyone silly enough to try and eat in front of her (actually, that's not dissimilar to the movie!).
A father who's remote, but who likes his new daughter-in-law. He's not only remote in the play, he's utterly boring, and would probably have been played by an aging matinee idol who had relied in the past on his charms rather than his acting skills to sway the public.
Two daughters, one serious and one scatty. Except in the play the serious one is a bit of a religious nut, and the scatty one is exceptionally catty with it.
John, who's naive and callow. At least in the film he also has some charm.
The neighbouring girl who would have married John if the outsider hadn't come in. She's much the same as in the film: wiser and warmer than the cold-hearted family.
The story is roughly similar: callow youth brings home gorgeous, slightly older woman, to the horror of the family. Woman has something in her past, and at the end has to leave for the sake of her sanity, even though she actually does love the boy.
But there the similarities end. Notice that I didn't say anything about the humour in the play; in fact, there's almost none. The funniest lines come in the author's introductions to his characters; their speech is seldom more than a little amusing - there's no laugh-out-loud humour here. Mrs Whittaker (the Kristin Scott Thomas character) is described thus: The stern repression of any sex emotions all her life has brought her to middle age with a faulty digestion which doesn't so much sour her temper as spread it. She views the world with the jaundiced eyes of a woman who subconsciously realises she has missed something, which means in point of fact that she has missed everything.
And what actress would be excited by this description of Marion, the older sister?: She is largely made and pasty, with big lymphatic eyes. Hilda, the younger sister, 'possesses all the vivacity of a deficient sense of humour.'
Which means that most of the humour and wit and nifty one-liners in the film are the film's scriptwriters, not Coward's. In fact, there's almost nothing of Coward in the movie, as far as lines go, at all. Furthermore, Coward doesn't provide us with the hay fever, the Picasso painting, the vicious chihuahua who gets squashed to death by being sat on, the motorcycle amidst the Hunt, the tango at the end with the father (nor the running away with him), the butler who's a bigamist, the can-can at the local cultural evening, the boyfriend with the broken leg, the other girl's wealthy father who's not only buying up the land but also has his eye (goodness knows why) on Mrs Whittaker senior. And the father has never been to war, been sullied by it, nor wandered about France living in brothels.
In other words, most unusually, the film is infinitely superior in almost every way. It would take a cast of considerable skill to make anything of the play as it stands; the movie even manages to remove the sense of datedness.
On top of this, Coward asks the impossible of the average modern producer: he asks for nine characters for the first two acts (plus adding in, during the second act, a young man of no importance who will appear unimportantly in the third, and an elderly bloke who appears for about a minute and is never seen again) and then in the third brings on another eight characters, plus several unnamed extras. These people have come to the ball that's taking place in the next room, and wander in and out randomly during the scene making inane remarks, or, to a degree, building up a bit of tension when the heroine doesn't appear on cue. So that's some dozen actors who do nothing for two acts and then do very little in the third.
I thought Priestly's When We Are Married was a bit oddly constructed in terms of its usage of some actors: Dyson the reporter appears in the first and second acts for about three minutes apiece and then disappears; Rev Mercer comes on late in the second act for two minutes, is hussled off and then gets another couple of minutes towards the end of the last act; Lottie turns up very late in the second act but at least gets some stage room; the niece gets five minutes early in the first act, another half minute a bit later on, and then a couple more minutes at the beginning of the third act. She's totally forgotten otherwise. Even the young man who sets everything in motion in the first act, where he's a major player, is dumped almost completely after that (he gets a couple of minutes at the beginning of the third act too). My character, Ormonroyd, appears with Dyson early in the first act, and then vanishes for well over an hour before he becomes a major character later in the piece. I suppose in the thirties actors were a lot cheaper, and they could be tossed on and off like this without consideration!
Of course, with the Coward, it makes a big difference, after two acts of constant talk (and very little action - another difference between the play and the film) to have lots of people bobbing in and out, and women and men in pretty dresses and evening wear. It gives the last act some additional lift (and it certainly needs it).
Well, there you go. A relatively straight play turned into a successful comic movie: wonders will never cease.
A butler called Furber, who is a real person in the movie; in the play he has no existence except buttling.
A strikingly good-looking woman who's married the heir in a very uptight family. However she isn't American in the play - and she's some years older than John; they go on about it all the time.
An extremely repressed mother, who doesn't, however, have any concerns about the family property, though she's so uptight about life in general from the moment the curtain rises that she would act as an appetite suppressant to anyone silly enough to try and eat in front of her (actually, that's not dissimilar to the movie!).
A father who's remote, but who likes his new daughter-in-law. He's not only remote in the play, he's utterly boring, and would probably have been played by an aging matinee idol who had relied in the past on his charms rather than his acting skills to sway the public.
Two daughters, one serious and one scatty. Except in the play the serious one is a bit of a religious nut, and the scatty one is exceptionally catty with it.
John, who's naive and callow. At least in the film he also has some charm.
The neighbouring girl who would have married John if the outsider hadn't come in. She's much the same as in the film: wiser and warmer than the cold-hearted family.
The story is roughly similar: callow youth brings home gorgeous, slightly older woman, to the horror of the family. Woman has something in her past, and at the end has to leave for the sake of her sanity, even though she actually does love the boy.
But there the similarities end. Notice that I didn't say anything about the humour in the play; in fact, there's almost none. The funniest lines come in the author's introductions to his characters; their speech is seldom more than a little amusing - there's no laugh-out-loud humour here. Mrs Whittaker (the Kristin Scott Thomas character) is described thus: The stern repression of any sex emotions all her life has brought her to middle age with a faulty digestion which doesn't so much sour her temper as spread it. She views the world with the jaundiced eyes of a woman who subconsciously realises she has missed something, which means in point of fact that she has missed everything.
And what actress would be excited by this description of Marion, the older sister?: She is largely made and pasty, with big lymphatic eyes. Hilda, the younger sister, 'possesses all the vivacity of a deficient sense of humour.'
Which means that most of the humour and wit and nifty one-liners in the film are the film's scriptwriters, not Coward's. In fact, there's almost nothing of Coward in the movie, as far as lines go, at all. Furthermore, Coward doesn't provide us with the hay fever, the Picasso painting, the vicious chihuahua who gets squashed to death by being sat on, the motorcycle amidst the Hunt, the tango at the end with the father (nor the running away with him), the butler who's a bigamist, the can-can at the local cultural evening, the boyfriend with the broken leg, the other girl's wealthy father who's not only buying up the land but also has his eye (goodness knows why) on Mrs Whittaker senior. And the father has never been to war, been sullied by it, nor wandered about France living in brothels.
In other words, most unusually, the film is infinitely superior in almost every way. It would take a cast of considerable skill to make anything of the play as it stands; the movie even manages to remove the sense of datedness.
On top of this, Coward asks the impossible of the average modern producer: he asks for nine characters for the first two acts (plus adding in, during the second act, a young man of no importance who will appear unimportantly in the third, and an elderly bloke who appears for about a minute and is never seen again) and then in the third brings on another eight characters, plus several unnamed extras. These people have come to the ball that's taking place in the next room, and wander in and out randomly during the scene making inane remarks, or, to a degree, building up a bit of tension when the heroine doesn't appear on cue. So that's some dozen actors who do nothing for two acts and then do very little in the third.
I thought Priestly's When We Are Married was a bit oddly constructed in terms of its usage of some actors: Dyson the reporter appears in the first and second acts for about three minutes apiece and then disappears; Rev Mercer comes on late in the second act for two minutes, is hussled off and then gets another couple of minutes towards the end of the last act; Lottie turns up very late in the second act but at least gets some stage room; the niece gets five minutes early in the first act, another half minute a bit later on, and then a couple more minutes at the beginning of the third act. She's totally forgotten otherwise. Even the young man who sets everything in motion in the first act, where he's a major player, is dumped almost completely after that (he gets a couple of minutes at the beginning of the third act too). My character, Ormonroyd, appears with Dyson early in the first act, and then vanishes for well over an hour before he becomes a major character later in the piece. I suppose in the thirties actors were a lot cheaper, and they could be tossed on and off like this without consideration!
Of course, with the Coward, it makes a big difference, after two acts of constant talk (and very little action - another difference between the play and the film) to have lots of people bobbing in and out, and women and men in pretty dresses and evening wear. It gives the last act some additional lift (and it certainly needs it).
Well, there you go. A relatively straight play turned into a successful comic movie: wonders will never cease.
September 6, 2017
Well, I thoroughly enjoyed the 2008 movie, so I thought it worth reading the play, and it was. Post WWI, a young man brings home to his family's estate his new wife, a divorcee whom his family expects to be cheap, gaudy, and dreadful. She isn't, but they treat her that way anyway. Lots of terrific Coward dialogue and although the sacrificial ending is disappointing, the perspective on the dying aristocracy and the smallness of petty jealous minds is better than the melodrama of Downton Abbey. Watch the movie first.
December 28, 2018
I absolutely loved this play. So much of it felt fresh that I was able to identify with some of the ideas more than 92 years later. The dialogue is profound. Oh, and contrary to other reviewers, I liked the play better than the movie. I'll be forever thankful for the tango scene, but all the brutally honest analysis of human behavior was left out.
March 5, 2017
Very good but the movie was better.
March 26, 2019
Look, I wanted credit for reading something and even though it's a play, I'm counting it!
I was really surprised at what an engaging read this actually is. It's wit is in its observation and feels relevant to conservative families of today without much updating. ("Ra-ther!"s aside)
I was really surprised at what an engaging read this actually is. It's wit is in its observation and feels relevant to conservative families of today without much updating. ("Ra-ther!"s aside)
October 4, 2023
I read this after watching the 2008 film adaptation starring Jessica Biel and Colin Firth.
It's interesting to see the differences between the film and the play, especially the difference in the ending, and the differences in the relationship/love/character development between John and Larita.
It's interesting to see the differences between the film and the play, especially the difference in the ending, and the differences in the relationship/love/character development between John and Larita.
September 26, 2013
I don't really read things like this as I find the characters 'awfully boring' but I'm working on a new production of this next term and it's frowned upon if you don't know the story, especially as I'm HOD this time around.
The story itself isn't that bad - it doesn't have much to it. It basically focuses on social prejudice and class. I found it an easy read, not a struggle to get through at all and there are hints of comedy that come through which lightened it a bit.
The characters were quite interesting as well.
I know it's said to not be one of his best, but I quite liked it in the end.
The story itself isn't that bad - it doesn't have much to it. It basically focuses on social prejudice and class. I found it an easy read, not a struggle to get through at all and there are hints of comedy that come through which lightened it a bit.
The characters were quite interesting as well.
I know it's said to not be one of his best, but I quite liked it in the end.
August 14, 2017
3.5 stars. This is one of the rare instances when movie was better than the book. However I admit that it is not fair comparison, since the movie was adapted to our "modern taste"... But still, I enjoyed the move more. Not that I did not enjoy the book but without the movie as a reference, it would not catch my attention, or hold it for long.
February 19, 2015
182 - 2015
Displaying 1 - 12 of 12 reviews