PRIVATE LIVES, in the opinion of most critics, is the likeliest candidate as Noël Coward’s masterpiece. It, along with HAY FEVER, DESIGN FOR LIVING, PRESENT LAUGHTER and BLITHE SPIRIT, admit Coward to the line of great English comic dramatists such as Congreve, Sheridan and Wilde. “With the sole exception of Bernard Shaw, Noël Coward has…
Rita, a young hairdresser, registers for a literature course offered by the Open University, sensing that it will enrich and increase her possibilities in life. During her tutorials, she becomes a different person, gradually liberating herself from the limitations of her working class background, family and marriage. She exchanges the small talk of the hair…
The play is set in the Wiltshire, England manor house of Andrew Wyke, an immensely successful mystery writer. His home reflects Wyke’s obsession with the inventions and deceptions of fiction and his fascination with games and game-playing. He lures his wife’s lover, Milo Tindle, to the house and convinces him to stage a robbery of…
This is a gripping drama about an unusual terrorist, one who is brilliant, articulate and right? Victor is the head of a group responsible for a bomb attack at the White House in which 27 people have been killed He has a television news reporter led to his lair so she can tell the world…
This long-running Broadway comedy (also a popular film) is not only about a love affair taking place once a year. It is also a reflection of 25 years of American manners, morals and attitudes mirrored in the changing lives and personalities of its two characters. George picks up Doris in a California inn in 1951,…
Susan Kerner, a young Boston college student and Larry Eastwood, a young lawyer she’s just met, have been enticed to the Brabissant mansion by the Mackeys, a charming, elderly Irish couple who are struck by Susan’s strong resemblance to Veronica Brabissant, long dead daughter of the family for whom they work They view Veronica’s picture…
I OUGHT TO BE IN PICTURES is the poignant story of a father and daughter trying to pick up the pieces of a broken home. Set in the showbiz world of Hollywood that the author knows so well, it is about a failed scriptwriter whose struggling existence is suddenly shattered by the arrival on his…
In the attic of a soon-to-be-demolished house, two brothers meet after a 16 year estrangement to dispose of their dead parents’ property The first is a policeman who sacrificed his education and probably a career as a scientist to care for his ruined, invalid father. The other, who arrives late, is an eminent surgeon who…
Of all of Oscar Wilde’s plays, THE IMPORTANCE OF BEING EARNEST is the most timeless and universal. There is certainly very little in the play one could call dated, even more than a hundred years after it was written. Perhaps this is because it is almost pure comedy. The plot is as improbable today as…
Sidney Bruhl is a once-successful playwright whose last several productions have flopped at the box office. He then receives a script by a novice writer named Clifford Anderson for a stage thriller entitled Deathtrap. Bruhl tells his wife Myra that the script is brilliant and he then concocts a murder plot whereby he will offer…