Private Lives | Happy Birthday, Dear Noel
In this review of a 1968 revival performance of Private Lives, Gill offers the opinion that this work is Coward's finest and a prime example of skilled farce. The critic also states that the enduring appeal of the play is a fitting birthday present for Coward, whose seventieth anniversary was marked by the new production.
Four of the most fruitful days of 1929 were surely those that Noel Coward, on a lazy holiday tap around the world, spent writing Private Lives. The first act of the play, which I don't hesitate to call as nearly flawless a first act for a comedy as any in the language, is said to have been jotted down overnight—formidable proof of the fact, repugnant to puritans, that time and effort have no necessary connection with achievement in the arts. Neither, for that matter, does age—Coward was twenty-nine when he wrote Private Lives, and he was never to surpass it (Indeed, he...
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