Coward Plays: 4: Blithe Spirit; Present Laughter; This Happy Breed; Tonight at 8.30 (ii) (World Classics)

Volume Four of Noël Coward's plays features a selection of his works from the thirties and forties, including Blithe Spirit, a comedy centered around the spirit medium Madame Arcati. This play, which pokes fun at sudden death, was written during the darkest years of the war and became the longest-running comedy in British theatre history.

Present Laughter follows the life of Garry Essendine, a world-weary, middle-aged figure who embodies the debonair, self-obsessed persona. This comedy, originally a vehicle for Coward himself, reflects the theatrical world he was intimately familiar with and is the closest thing to an autobiographical play he ever wrote.

This Happy Breed is a saga of a lower middle-class family, while three shorter pieces from Tonight at 8.30 include a farce set in the South of France and serve as a tribute to Frederick Lonsdale. The Astonished Heart deals with the decay of a psychiatrist's mind due to personal sexual obsession, and Red Peppers, which closes the volume, cynically pays homage to the lost music halls of the First World War.

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