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 Noel 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.