Coward Plays: 1: Hay Fever; The Vortex; Fallen Angels; Easy Virtue

By Noël Coward

Drama

Bloomsbury Academic
Publication date: October 2012

ISBN: 9781408177310

Digital Book format: PDF (Adobe DRM)

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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,
Cowards 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