Noël Coward

"I will ever be grateful for the almost psychic gift that enabled me to write Blithe Spirit in five days during one of the darkest years of the war."-Noel Coward. Written in 1941, Blithe Spirit remained the longest-running comedy in British Theatre for three decades. Plotted around the central role of one of Coward's best loved characters, a spirit medium Madame Arcati (originally performed by Margaret Rutherford) Coward's play is an escapist comedy about a man whose two previous wives return to haunt him.

Blithe Spirit

One of Coward's best-loved classics in a single-play edition Coward's wit and precision as a modern dramatist is nowhere better exemplified than in this classic modern plays from 1930. Elyot Chase and Amanda Prynne (originally played by Gertrude Lawrence and Noël Coward), recently divorced from one another five years previously, arrive coincidentally at the same French hotel. They are honeymooning with their respective new spouses. Encountering one another by chance, each is at once horrified and fascinated by the other. Together they leave for Paris and begin a roundelay of quarrels and love intrigues that culminate in their getting back together.

Private Lives

"This 1925 comedy of manners that's funny yet also unorthodox and unsettling... a celebration of abnormality and at the same time a disquieting study of both the pleasures and the pains of not being able to restrain oneself." - Evening Standard When four guests, all invited by different members of the Bliss family, arrive for a weekend at their country house near Maidenhead, they're expecting a idyllic retreat. But this peaceful promise is quickly trounced when the self-absorbed eccentricities of the Blisses are trained on the guests, who leave the country mansion humiliated and embarrassed. First produced in 1925, Hay Fever is a technical masterpiece, seamlessly combining high farce with a comedy of manners, and delivering Coward his first major commercial success. This new edition is published in Methuen Drama's iconic Modern Classics series to coincide with the 125th anniversary of Coward's birth and features a new introduction by Michael Billington.

Hay Fever

شهر العسل

'The actual facts are so simple. I love you. You love me. You love Otto. I love Otto. Otto loves you. Otto loves me. There now! Start to unravel from there.' Design for Living is a wickedly witty dark romantic comedy by Noel Coward. Initially banned in the UK, this provocative play portrays three amoral, glib and stylish characters and their hopelessly inescapable, if also unconventional, emotional entanglement. From 1930s bohemian Paris to the dizzying heights of Manhattan society, a tempestuous love triangle unravels between a vivacious interior designer, Gilda, playwright Leo and artist Otto - three people unashamedly and passionately in love with each other. They are trapped in what Coward called 'a three-sided erotic hodge podge.' With Coward's trademark piquant style, this lively, funny but also atypical play looks at dazzling, egotistical creatures and their self-destructive dependence on each other. Exploring themes of bisexuality, celebrity, success and self-obsession, Design for Living is a stylish and scandalous comedy.

Design for Living

Written as a vehicle for Coward's own acting talents alongside his frequent stage partner Gertrude Lawrence, Tonight at 8:30 is Coward's ambitious series of ten one-act plays which saw him breathe new life into the one-act form. First performed in London in 1936, the plays perfectly showcase Coward's talents as a playwright, providing a sparkling, fast-paced and remarkably varied selection of theatrical gems. All ten plays are collected together into this volume that features both Coward's own preface and an introduction by Barry Day, editor of The Letters of Nöel Coward. Coward wrote of the first series of three plays with characteristic delight: 'They are all brilliantly written, exquisitely directed, and I am bewitching in all of them.' Gertrude Lawrence wrote to Coward in 1947, 'Dearest Noël, wherever I go . . . all I hear is "Please revive Tonight at 8.30!"' 'Tonight at 8.30 surprises as much as it delights as, in some of the plays, Coward takes us to a world far removed from that of the wealth and glamour of the debonair London socialites who dominated much of his earlier work. But The Master's polish and sparkle are never far away as music and song intertwine with the wit and insight of one of our greatest ever playwrights.' Chichester Festival Theatre, 2006.

We Were Dancing; The Astonished Heart; ‘Red Peppers’; Hands Across the Sea; Fumed Oak; Shadow Play; Ways and Means; Still Life; Family Album; Star Chamber

Tonight At 8.30

Book, Lyrics and Music by Noël Coward

Charles B. Cochran's 1928 Revue This Year of Grace!

Christopher Luscombe

Coward's legendary last play finally received its London premiere in 2001. With all the biting wit and insight you'd expect, this is an evocative farewell from the master of the London stage.

Star Quality

An Intimate Comedy in Three Acts

At the centre of his own universe sits matinee idol Garry Essendine: suave, hedonistic and too old, says his wife, to be having numerous affairs. His line in harmless, infatuated debutantes is largely tolerated but playing closer to home is not. Just before he escapes on tour to Africa the full extent of his misdemeanours is discovered. And all hell breaks loose. Noël Coward's Present Laughter premiered in the early years of the Second World War just as such privileged lives were threatened with fundamental social change. This edition of the play is published to coincide with the National Theatre's production running from September 2007. The text features an introduction that considers the directorial decisions and interpretation in the National's production.

Present Laughter

This first volume in the Coward Collection contains four plays written within a two year period when Coward and the century were still in their 20s. The volume is introduced by Sheridan Morley, Coward's first biographer. Hay Fever, a comedy of bad manners, concerns a weekend with friends of the Bliss family, who have all been invited independently for a weekend at their country house near Maidenhead. The Vortex was a controversial drama in its time, introducing drug-addiction onto the stage at a time when alcoholism was barely mentioned. Fallen Angels, which is written for two star actresses was described as 'degenerate', 'vile', 'obscene', 'shocking' - the second half of the play is entirely taken up with an alcoholic duologue between the two women. Easy Virtue is an elegant, laconic tribute to a lost world of drawing-room dramas, no other writer went more directly to the jugular of that moralistic, tight-lipped but fundamentally hypocritical 20s society. "He is simply a phenomenon, and one that is unlikely to occur ever again in theatre history" Terence Rattigan

Hay Fever; The Vortex; Fallen Angels; Easy Virtue

Coward Plays: 1

Displaying an early dedication to the theatre, Present Indicative hints at the success that would come to Noel Coward as actor, playwright, novelist and performer, charting his progress from a 'brazen odious little prodigy' to Cavalcade in 1931. Each line is punctuated with Coward's trademark wit, making this book a comic tour de force in its own right, as well as a 'must read' for anyone with an interest in the British stage and the man who so clearly owned it.

The First Autobiography of Noel Coward

Present Indicative

The definitive account, in his own words, of one of the most popular figures in British theatre. The second and concluding volume of Noël Coward's legendary autobiography includes Future Indefinite and the unfinished Past Unconditional. With his trademark wit, Coward delivers anecdotes about his travels in South America, Hollywood encounters with an array of contemporary stars and directors, and his later theatrical successes, including the Broadway triumph of Design For Living. The showbiz glamour aside, we also encounter a middle-aged man coming to terms with a world in disarray; his confused feelings towards the war and his own part in it exposing a more serious and thoughtful side to a performer and raconteur more usually associated with frivolity. Future Indefinite sees Coward transformed from a 'brazen odious little prodigy' into one of the most exuberant characters in British theatrical history. "His writing is superb, his precise languid drawl put down on the page" Daily Express

Future Indefinite

A Collection of 32 Coward Classics

Sir Noël Coward, His Words and Music

This is a new release of the original 1930 edition.

Collected Plays

Play Parade

Coward

"This special edition is published to mark the centenary of No'el Coward's birth."--P. [4] of cover.

Design for Living; Cavalcade; Conversation Piece; Tonight at 8.30 9i); Still Life

Coward Plays: 3

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.

Noël Coward

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