Collected plays

著者

• Coward, Noel
• Morley, Sheridan

書誌事項

Collected plays

Noël Coward ; introduces by Sheridan Morley

（Methuen world classics, . The Coward collection）

Methuen Drama, 1999-

• 1
• 3
• 4
• 5
• 6
• 7
• 8
• 2

収録内容

• 1: Hay fever
• The vortex
• Fallen Angels
• Easy virtue
• 7: Quadrille
• "Peace in our time"
• Tonight at 8:30 (part 2)
• 8: "I'll leave it to you"
• The young idea
• "This was a man"

内容説明・目次

巻冊次

1 ISBN 9780413460608

内容説明

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

目次

• Hay Fever
• The Vortex
• Fallen Angels
• Easy Virtue

巻冊次

2 ISBN 9780413460806

内容説明

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.

目次

• Private Lives
• Bitter-Sweet
• The Marquise
• Post-Mortem

巻冊次

3 ISBN 9780413461001

内容説明

The third volume of Coward's plays contains some of his best work from the thirties. Design for Living - is about a triangular alliance between two men and a woman, based on friends of Coward's, which he waited to write "until she and he and I had arrived by different roads in our careers at a time and a place when we felt we could all three play together with a more or less equal degree of success." Cavalcade was Coward's most ambitious stage project, set during the Boer War, which cost GBP30,000 in its day and which includes scenes of the relief of the sinking of the Titanic and the coming of the Jazz Age. Conversation Piece is a musical comedy that Noel wrote for the Parisian star Yvonne Printemps and includes the song "I'll Follow My Secret Heart". Also in the volume are three short plays including Tonight at 8.30 - Hands Across the Sea, a gentle satire of colonials and London Society; Still Life which became the film Brief Encounter and Fumed Oak a suburban comedy about a 'worm who turns'. The volume is introduced by Sheridan Morley.

目次

• Design for Living
• Cavalcade
• Conversation Piece
• Tonight at 8.30 (i)
• Still Life

巻冊次

4 ISBN 9780413461209

内容説明

Volume Four of Noel 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 Noel 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 8.3 0 - 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.

目次

• Blithe Spirit
• Present Laughter
• This Happy Breed
• Tonight at 8.30 (ii)

巻冊次

5 ISBN 9780413517401

内容説明

Containing Coward's best work from the last two decades of his life, this volume includes Relative Values, which ran for over a year in 1951-2, Look After Lulu (1959), his perennially popular Feydeau adaptation, Waiting in the Wings (1960), a bravura piece set in a home for retired actresses, and Suite in Three Keys (1965), a trilogy of plays which gave Coward his last roles on stage. The volume is introduced by Sheridan Morley, Coward's first biographer, and includes an extensive chronology of Coward's work.

目次

• Relative Values
• Look After Lulu
• Waiting in the Wings
• Suite in Three Keys

巻冊次

7 ISBN 9780413734006

内容説明

The Seventh volume in the Coward Collection. On Quadrille: "Miss Fontanne plays the madcap Marchioness with the crackle and sheen of a five-pound note. Her eyes mock marvelously, her voice cuts like a knife into a wedding cake, and the scene in Act Three, on the eve of her elopement with Mr. Lung, is as delicious as crushed ice." Evening Standard, 1952. "The idea of Peace in Our Time", Coward wrote "was conceived in Paris shortly after the Liberation...I began to suspect that the physical effect of four years intermittent bombing is far less damaging to the intrinsic character of a nation than the spiritual effect of four years enemy occupation."The volume also contains four pieces from the Tonight at 8.30 sequence: We Were Dancing "provides a marvelously compact illustration of the way the English public school spirit prevails even in moments of strenuous passion." "Shadow Play is a musical fantasy...which gave Gertie and me a chance to sing as romantically as we could, dance in the moonlight and, we hoped, convince the audience that we were very fascinating indeed"; and "Family Album - a sly satire on Victorian hypocrisy, adorned with an unobtrusive but agreeable musical score. It was stylised both in its decor and its performance, was a joy to play and provided the whole talented company with good parts." Star Chamber, closely based on Coward's experiences trying to co-ordinate his Actors' Orphanage charity committee, is published here for the first time.

目次

• Quadrille
• 'Peace in Our Time'
• Tonight at 8.30 (iii)

巻冊次

6 ISBN 9780413734105

内容説明

Philip Hoare, in his biography of Coward described Semi-Monde as his "most daring play to date. In a chic Parisian hotel, a series of sexual pairings take place through rendezvous, arguments, infidelities and reconciliations: sexual deviance is undisguised...set in the bisexual 1920s, the play could easily be populated by characters of Coward's society". Point Valaine is "the drama of a lurid episode of lust in the semi-tropics. unmistakably the work of a master of the stage" (New York Times); South Sea Bubble which concerns "the Governor's lady in the Isle of Samolo who plays with native fire, nearly gets her wings singed, bashes her native admirer with a bottle and at one of those Coward next-morning-at breakfast scenes slips her way out of the scrape with feline grace." (Manchester Guardian) whilst Nude With Violin is a witty comedy about art fraud.

目次

• Semi-Monde
• Point Valaine
• South Sea Bubble
• Nude With Violin

巻冊次

8 ISBN 9780413755100

内容説明

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".

目次

• I'll Leave it to You
• The Young Idea
• This Was a Man

「Nielsen BookData」 より

詳細情報

• NII書誌ID(NCID): BA47442185
• ISBN:
  • 9780413460608
  • 0413461009
  • 0413461203
  • 0413517403
  • 0413734102
  • 0413734005
  • 041375510X
  • 0413460800
• 出版国コード: uk
• タイトル言語コード: eng
• 本文言語コード: eng
• 出版地: London
• ページ数/冊数: v.
• 大きさ: 20 cm
• 分類:
  • LCC : PR6005.O85
• 親書誌ID:
  • BA2515879X