Coward Plays 4

Author : Noël Coward
Publisher : Bloomsbury Publishing
ISBN 13 : 135035368X
Total Pages : 145 pages
Book Rating : 4.88/5 ( download)

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Download or read book Design for Living written by Noël Coward and published by Bloomsbury Publishing. This book was released on 2023-05-04 with total page 145 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: "Its fusion of passion and mischief remains striking and there is something undeniably heady about its celebration of a kind of sexual liberation that looks a lot like flippancy" - Evening Standard 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. But can such a lavish love affair survive the real world? Exploring themes of bisexuality, celebrity, success and self-obsession, Design for Living is a stylish and scandalous comedy, that is often revered as Coward's most controversial and risqué work. This new edition is published in Methuen Drama's iconic Modern Classics series to coincide with the 50th anniversary of Coward's death and features a new introduction by Oliver Soden.

Author : Noël Coward
Publisher : A&C Black
ISBN 13 : 140817734X
Total Pages : 511 pages
Book Rating : 4.41/5 ( download)

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Download or read book Coward Plays: 4 written by Noël Coward and published by A&C Black. This book was released on 2013-11-12 with total page 511 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Volume Four of Noël Coward's plays contains a selection of Coward's plays from the thirties and forties which includes Blithe Spirit, a comedy that centres around the spirit medium Madame Arcati. The play that mocks sudden death was produced at precisely the moment when bombs were bringing it to Britain "I shall 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." The play was for years the longest-running comedy in the history of British theatre. Present Laughter follows the life of Garry Essendine, a world-weary, middle-aged projection of the dilettante, debonair persona - self-obsessed and dressing-gowned who struts through the play like an educated peacock. It is a comedy about the 'theatricals' that Noël best knew and loved, and was originally a star vehicle for himself. It is the closest to an autobiographical play that Coward ever wrote. This Happy Breed is a saga of a lower middle-class family; and three shorter pieces fromTonight at 8.30 - is a farce set in the South of France, and serves as an oblique tribute to Frederick Lonsdale; The Astonished Heart is about the decay of a psychiatrist's mind through personal sexual obsession. Red Peppers, which closes the volume, was a cynical tribute to the lost music halls of the First World War.

Author : Noël Coward
Publisher : A&C Black
ISBN 13 : 1408177315
Total Pages : 321 pages
Book Rating : 4.10/5 ( download)

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Download or read book Coward Plays: 1 written by Noël Coward and published by A&C Black. This book was released on 2013-12-02 with total page 321 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: 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

Author : Noël Coward
Publisher : Knopf
ISBN 13 : 0525657967
Total Pages : 480 pages
Book Rating : 4.65/5 ( download)

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Download or read book Noël Coward on (and in) Theatre written by Noël Coward and published by Knopf. This book was released on 2021-11-02 with total page 480 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Noël Coward on theatre was as dazzling and entertaining as his masterful plays and lyrics. Here his ideas and opinions on the subject are brilliantly brought together in an extraordinary collection of commentary, lyrics, essays, and asides on everything having to do with the theatre and Coward's dazzling life in it. The book Noël Coward wanted, promised, threatened to write—and never did. Including essays, interviews, diary entries, verse, his views on his fellow playwrights: "My Colleague Will," Shaw, Wilde, Chekhov, Barrie, Maugham, Eliot, Osborne, Albee, Beckett, Miller, Williams, Rattigan, Pinter, and Shaffer. Coward on the critics—many of whom irritated him over the years but came to admire him: James Agate, Alexander Woollcott, Graham Greene, Kenneth Tynan among them. And on the plays he wrote, among them: The Vortex; Hay Fever; Private Lives; Design For Living; Blithe Spirit. Here is the Master on the producers who crossed his path: André Charlot, C. B. Cochran, Binkie Beaumont. And the actors in the Coward galaxy: John Gielgud, Laurence Olivier, Gertrude Lawrence, the Lunts, etc. . . . His views on the art of acting: auditions, rehearsals, learning the lines, clarity of delivery, timing, control, range, stage fright, fans, theater audiences, revivals, comedy, "the Method," plays with a "message," taste, construction, "Star Quality," etc. . . . And last, but Noël Coward least, his experience in, and thoughts on: revue, cabaret, television, and musical theater, Bitter Sweet, Conversation Piece, Pacific 1860, After the Ball, Ace of Clubs, Sail Away, The Girl Who Came to Supper, Words and Music, This Year of Grace, London Calling! . . . and much more. Ingeniously, deftly compiled, edited, and annotated by Barry Day, Coward authority and editor of The Noёl Coward Reader and The Letters of Noёl Coward.

Author : Noël Coward
Publisher : Methuen Drama
ISBN 13 : 9780413734303
Total Pages : 488 pages
Book Rating : 4.07/5 ( download)

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Download or read book Coward Plays written by Noël Coward and published by Methuen Drama. This book was released on 1999-03 with total page 488 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt:

Author : Noël Coward
Publisher : A&C Black
ISBN 13 : 1408177382
Total Pages : 284 pages
Book Rating : 4.89/5 ( download)

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Download or read book Coward Plays: 8 written by Noël Coward and published by A&C Black. This book was released on 2014-03-20 with total page 284 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The eighth volume in the Coward Collection includes I'll Leave It To You and The Young Idea, the first of Coward's plays ever to be produced. These were, as he said, "enthusiastically acclaimed by the critics and ran five weeks and eight weeks respectively. In both of them I appeared with the utmost determination." This Was a Man, a slightly later play, was written in 1926, after the successes which made his name. It was originally banned by the Lord Chamberlain "for facetious adultery".

Author : Noel Coward
Publisher : Samuel French, Inc.
ISBN 13 : 9780573608803
Total Pages : 76 pages
Book Rating : 4.06/5 ( download)

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Download or read book Fallen Angels written by Noel Coward and published by Samuel French, Inc.. This book was released on 1958 with total page 76 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The love and friendship between two married couples and best friends are put to the test when a postcard arrives with a picture of Capri on one side, and on the other, news of the imminent arrival of a certain handsome Frenchman.

Author : Noel Coward
Publisher : New York Harper 1925.
ISBN 13 :
Total Pages : 116 pages
Book Rating : 4.19/5 ( download)

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Download or read book The Vortex written by Noel Coward and published by New York Harper 1925.. This book was released on 1924 with total page 116 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt:

Author : Noel Coward
Publisher : [New York] : Dell Publishing Company
ISBN 13 :
Total Pages : 260 pages
Book Rating : 4.69/5 ( download)

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Download or read book Three Plays by Noel Coward: Blithe Spirit, Hay Fever [and] Private Lives written by Noel Coward and published by [New York] : Dell Publishing Company. This book was released on 1965 with total page 260 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Blithe Spirit is a comic play by Noël Coward, described by the author as "an improbable farce in three acts". The play concerns the socialite and novelist Charles Condomine, who invites the eccentric medium and clairvoyant Madame Arcati to his house to conduct a séance, hoping to gather material for his next book.

Author : Noël Coward
Publisher : A&C Black
ISBN 13 : 1472503511
Total Pages : 302 pages
Book Rating : 4.10/5 ( download)

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Download or read book Tonight At 8.30 written by Noël Coward and published by A&C Black. This book was released on 2013-10-16 with total page 302 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: 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.