Coward Plays

<p>Volume Four of Noël Coward's plays contains a selection of Coward's<br>plays from the thirties and forties which includes <i>Blithe Spirit</i> a<br>comedy that centres around the spirit medium Madame Arcati. The play<br>that mocks sudden death was produced at precisely the moment when bombs<br>were bringing it to Britain I shall ever be grateful for the almost<br>psychic gift that enabled me to write <i>Blithe Spirit</i> in five days during<br>one of the darkest years of the war. The play was for years the<br>longest-running comedy in the history of British theatre. <i>Present<br>Laughter</i> follows the life of Garry Essendine a world-weary <br>middle-aged projection of the dilettante debonair persona -<br>self-obsessed and dressing-gowned who struts through the play like an<br>educated peacock. It is a comedy about the 'theatricals' that Noël best<br>knew and loved and was originally a star vehicle for himself. It is<br>the closest to an autobiographical play that Coward ever wrote. <p/><br><i>This<br>Happy Breed</i> is a saga of a lower middle-class family; and three shorter<br>pieces from<i>Tonight at 8.30 </i>- is a farce set in the South of France <br>and serves as an oblique tribute to Frederick Lonsdale; <i>The Astonished<br>Heart</i> is about the decay of a psychiatrist's mind through personal<br>sexual obsession. <i>Red Peppers</i> which closes the volume was a cynical<br>tribute to the lost music halls of the First World War.</p>