SHADOW PLAY- Noel Coward

Samuel French Acting Edition Description One of the "Tonight At 8:30" series produced in London and New York. Victoria has just returned from the theatre where shesaw a romantic musical. She takes an overdose of pillsjust before her husband enters and announces divorce plans. Victoria, head buzzing, attempts to understand his reasons. She slips into a fantastic dream that reviews their meeting, courtship and marriage. Coming to, she clings to her husband and he reconsiders.

One of 10 shot plays that make up Tonight at 8.30 written to be performed across 3 evenings.

REALTIVE VALUES REVIEW THE GUARDIAN Monday 14thApril 2014Patricia Hodge in Relative ValuesPatricia Hodge, left, is flawless as the conniving countess in Nol Cowards comedy at the Harold Pinter theatre, London. Photograph: Tristram KentonI can't imagine Nol Coward's 1951 light comedy being much better done than it is here. What is puzzling is whyTrevor Nunn, having done such a beautiful restoration job on Terence Rattigan's Flare Path, should choose to lavish similar loving care on a piece rancid with snobbery.Relative Values

by Nol Coward

Harold Pinter Theatre,

London

Directed by Trevor Nunn

To describe the situation briefly something no one could accuse Coward himself of doing there is trouble at Marshwood House. Felicity, the countess, is dismayed that her errant son plans to marry an American movie star, Miranda Frayle. But the countess's displeasure is nothing compared with that of her personal maid, Moxie, who threatens to quit Marshwood altogether, for intimate family reasons, before Miranda arrives. The action hinges on the countess's plan to keep Moxie while scuppering the marriage.The timing of the play is significant. Coward wrote it in 1951 shortly before the Conservatives were returned to power; and the play celebrates a reversion to the natural order of things where everyone knows his or her place. The countess's great desire is that her son should marry "someone of his own class". When it's suggested to Moxie that she might, for tactical reasons, be elevated to the rank of the countess's companion, she claims "it wouldn't do, it wouldn't be right". And the play ends with the butler, Crestwell, unequivocally toasting "the final inglorious disintegration of the most unlikely dream that ever troubled the foolish heart of man Social EqualityCoward's politics, you could say, were his own business. But here he attempts to make them ours as well by assuming we all share his assumptions about the horrors of socialism, the Festival of Britain and marrying beneath one's station.Compared with the crisp brilliance of his plays of the 1930s and 1940s, the plotting seems loose and the dialogue flabby. But what is most puzzling is his faintly malicious portrait of the American interloper. Could it be that Coward secretly resented the postwar American theatrical takeover, especially given the signal failure of his own musical, Pacific 1860, at Drury Lane?Whatever the answer, the play has been done up to the nines by Nunn, who has cannily inserted newsreel material to evoke the period. Patricia Hodge is flawless as the conniving countess, although I'm intrigued by Coward's assumption that an endless capacity for ironic insult is a sign of good breeding. Caroline Quentin lends the moody Moxie a permanent sense of comic disgruntlement, Steven Pacey ingeniously finds a gay subtext in the underwritten character of the countess's nephew, and Leigh Zimmerman invests the invasive movie star with a grace and dignity that makes you feel she's the one who'd be marrying beneath her. Rory Bremner even manages to reconcile one to the butler by suggesting his air of omniscient superiority is carefully manufactured. But, while there's much pleasure to be had from the stylish acting and direction, Coward's play remains a musty, tribal relic in praise of the class system.

Relative Values divides critics at West End debut BBC NEWSRory Bremner and Patricia Hodge in Relative ValuesThe action is set in the library of Marshwood HallSir Trevor Nunn's revival of the Noel Coward play Relative Values, starring Patricia Hodge and Rory Bremner, has divided critics on its opening night.The 1951 play examining the class divide was "ideal for our Downton-obsessed times",said The Telegraph.But it was "a piece rancid with snobbery", countered The Guardian.

Sir Nol Peirce Coward(16 December 1899 26 March 1973) was an English playwright, composer, director, actor and singer, known for his wit, flamboyance, and whatTimemagazine called "a sense of personal style, a combination of cheek and chic, pose and poise".[Find it Library resource - Reviews the film "Relative Values," directed by Eric Styles. Notes that this film is based on Nel Coward's play of the same name. Comments that an "antediluvian snobbery nonetheless stipples this slight movie."