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.
