Collected Plays, Vol. 1: Hay Fever, The Vortex, Fallen Angels and Easy Virtue

by Noel Coward (Author), Sheridan Morley (Introduction)

• Used

  Paperback
  1999

  $7.59

  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

• New

  Paperback
  1991

  $21.16

  Classic plays reissued in the new Methuen Greek Classics series in a new distinctive style The Persians; based on the destruction of the Persian invaders in 480BC, breaks with the Greek tradition of purely dramatising myths to deals with the recent past and with characters who would have been familiar to its first audience in 472BC; Prometheus Bound stages the stand off between the original rebel and hero Prometheus and almighty Zeus; Suppliants, follows the plight of Danaus and his daughters, in flight from a fateful marriage contract with the King of Egypt's sons and shows the triumph of humanity over brute force while Seven Against Thebes dramatises the final battle between the two sons of Oedipus Eteocles and Polynices in the climax of the Oedipus saga. Translated by Kenneth McLeish and Frederic Raphael, these plays are widely studied in schools, colleges and universities.