Born in 1899, Noel Coward had become a successful child actor by 1911. He learned how to be a playwright by first learning the art of acting.
His first play, I'll Leave It to You, was produced in 1920 when Coward was barely 21 years old. By 1924 he had achieved notoriety as the author of The Vortex, a lurid study of drug-addiction and perverse sex that reflected the moral turmoil of the 1920s. Indeed, much of Coward's early work, including Fallen Angels (1925), produced at the Public Theatre in 1999, explores the sexual and social taboo-breaking of that decade.
After The Vortex, Coward's career as a playwright was assured. However, he soon abandoned the dark themes of that play, turning to comedy instead. By the end of his career he had become one of the most prolific and successful authors of light comedy and farce in the history of English theater. Among his best-known works are Hay Fever (1925), Private Lives (1930), Design for Living (1933), and Blithe Spirit (1941).
Coward, an actor as well as a playwright, often performed in his own dramas, while in real life he assumed a public persona that closely resembled one of his fictional characters. As Sarah Duerden tells us, "the name 'Coward' has become synonymous with a certain English style: the elegant silk dressing gown, the cigarette holder, charm, wit, clipped phrases, upper-class accents, and sex appeal." What gives Coward's work its peculiar flavor is the way British suavity and social polish are juxtaposed in his plays with the violent and absurd behavior produced by his characters’ clamorous sexual desires and their uncontrollable feelings of jealousy, anger, and spite. Out of this conflict between elegant sang-froid and the hot-blooded madness of passion arises the essential comedy of Coward.
His first play, I'll Leave It to You, was produced in 1920 when Coward was barely 21 years old. By 1924 he had achieved notoriety as the author of The Vortex, a lurid study of drug-addiction and perverse sex that reflected the moral turmoil of the 1920s. Indeed, much of Coward's early work, including Fallen Angels (1925), produced at the Public Theatre in 1999, explores the sexual and social taboo-breaking of that decade.
After The Vortex, Coward's career as a playwright was assured. However, he soon abandoned the dark themes of that play, turning to comedy instead. By the end of his career he had become one of the most prolific and successful authors of light comedy and farce in the history of English theater. Among his best-known works are Hay Fever (1925), Private Lives (1930), Design for Living (1933), and Blithe Spirit (1941).
Coward, an actor as well as a playwright, often performed in his own dramas, while in real life he assumed a public persona that closely resembled one of his fictional characters. As Sarah Duerden tells us, "the name 'Coward' has become synonymous with a certain English style: the elegant silk dressing gown, the cigarette holder, charm, wit, clipped phrases, upper-class accents, and sex appeal." What gives Coward's work its peculiar flavor is the way British suavity and social polish are juxtaposed in his plays with the violent and absurd behavior produced by his characters’ clamorous sexual desires and their uncontrollable feelings of jealousy, anger, and spite. Out of this conflict between elegant sang-froid and the hot-blooded madness of passion arises the essential comedy of Coward.